‘—Midway between the two, the writer has developed the habit of speaking about himself as though referring to another—Exorcism, narcissism; in an autobiography, the I is all spectacle. Nothing manages to interrupt that hallowed area of subjectivity, someone tells himself about his own life, the object and subject of the narration, the only narrator and only protagonist; the I also seems to be the only witness.’

'—the conversation takes on a technical quality, and they start talking in a kind of idiolect that I can hardly decipher. And in this way, I can confirm that it is not only lovers who build up a personal language; wherever passion is at play, language is also forced to conform to the peculiarities of the people using it.—love is also a language that you must learn again each time—forget the words of the past and learn the words of the future. A single language, whose syntax and verbal content changes according to the circumstances of love.'

'I have literary narcolepsy—I fall asleep when I don’t like the style of the conversation.'

'The truth is we immediately created a shared language, an idiolect, a private language that only two people can speak, which, for me, has always been the nature of love.—I have a fear—of all rhetorical excesses. For me, it is the greatest of virtue to use language with precision and clarity.'

'Beckett also took the same path, noting that, after Joyce, it was better to abandon English, and, as we know, he started writing in French because he could write badly in that language—that is, without style. In both cases, always an esoteric quality: in the example of Joyce, there is an esoteric quality in Finnegans, namely a rupture of the lexicon; in his turn, Hemingway worked with extreme subtraction, and his best stories are also esoteric because their allusions are not explicit.'

'I admire Sartre but do not share his moralism and his good sentiments.—Narrating is like swimming, Pavese would say.'

'Sentences must be able to create situations. A sentence condenses an act. The image must be narrative. The narrative image. Wittgenstein’s example, describing discernment from a room: we see a man through the window, walking with difficulty, moving his arms as though rowing. The image changes if we know there is a storm outside and a strong wind is coming in from the sea.'

'I sleep anyplace I can and live on what I find in the sea—When we enter the ocean, we lose our language. Only the body exists, the rhythm of the oar’s strokes and the resplendence of day on the water’s surface. While swimming, we do not think about anything, only the brightness of the sun against the transparency of the water. The sea here is dangerous and deep, but not treacherous. You have to know the subterranean movements of the tides and avoid the frozen currents towing in the sea. It seems calm today, but the current, dark and heavy, is visible like some submerged creature in the clarity of the water. It means that the tides are low, and I will be able to swim, dodging the cold edges of the undertow until I cross the final breaker—.'

'I am reading Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night once again. The rhythm of the prose constructs the story.—I am excited by the confessional tone in which “evil” is narrated. In one sense, it is the limit of the first person: you have to explain why this individual is able to accuse himself of acts that society considers heinous. Céline consciously constructs horrible scenes, never self-incriminates, never complains, only narrates the events with a slightly cynical tone in order to show that, in the moment of writing, he can only remember the wicked events he is narrating. He is another who seems to have purified himself only by telling the truth.'

'Rereading my “notebooks” is a novel experience; perhaps a story can be extracted from that reading. It astonishes me, all of the time, as though I were someone else (and that is what I am). It is incredible to realize that I blindly decided my destiny—here in this room, with a window opening onto the branches of the jacaranda tree, planted on the path, before I was born. Incredible to remember—speaking of destiny—the importance of chance.'

'I pass the night without sleeping, returning, it seems, to insomnia: I have been prone to sleep loss all of my life. I can’t remember any other night like last night. I thought I was traveling in a long-distance train—The feeling of forward motion, the sound of the tracks, and the light of the deserted towns that we swiftly crossed made me fall asleep near sunrise. Light sleep, the stage immediately preceding sleep, has an oneiric quality, and yet we are the ones imagining what we see. Part of the night I was also scheming about inscriptions for the book I still have not published or finished writing. In these images, when you personally give a book you have written to a friend—or someone—and sign a copy after writing a phrase, isn’t there a distant sense of literature? We always write for particular people—.'

'I feel so light that I could be a cat. The sky went dark at ten in the morning. A ferocious storm: it rains buckets, as they say.'

‘This all sounds sentimental, but it is the result of always finding myself with no security other than what I create for myself. I guess that, someday, I will have time to remake these notebooks, and recover the rhythm of the years being filtered through my hands. In the end, if the diaries are all that remains, it will be possible to see them as the endeavour of a person who first decides to be a writer and then starts writing a series of notebooks, before anything else, in which he records his devotion to that imaginary profession. One day I’ll try to shape it into something and leave behind a loose thread, clear and strong, from which the spool of my life can be unravelled. Maybe that is why I write them; sometimes they bother me, but I go on ahead as though there were a contract, the meaning of which will become clear at the end (of what?). In my literature, more clearly than anywhere else, you can see something I’ll call overthinking “my personality”: I seem very rational and aware, but I’ll never know why I chose to dedicate my life to literature, nor do I know what forces or winds allow me, once in a while, to produce some acceptable pages—I uproot myself from this blue table by the open window in the breeze that heralds the summer and, to avoid new confused outpourings, I stand, light the fire, put on the kettle, and prepare some yerba maté.’