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Italo Calvino [1923-1985] Italian

Rank: 101
Journalist

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics collection of short stories, and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler.

Chance, Communication, Romantic, Travel

Quote	Tags	Rank
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.		101
Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.		102
In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.		103
It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.	Communication	104
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.	Romantic	105
I suffer from everyday life.		106
An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.		107
I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.		108
A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.		109
I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.		110
I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing.		111
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.		112
A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno.		113
A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.		114
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.	Travel	115
The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.	Chance	116
Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.		117
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.		118
The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.		119
Folktales are real.		120
If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.		121
Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.		122
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.		123
Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.		124
One writes fables in periods of oppression.		125
I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year.		126
Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.		201
A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.		202
Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.	Chance	203
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.		204
I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.		205
Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.		206
I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.		207
What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth?		208
When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.		209
Rarely does an interviewer ask questions you did not expect. I have given a lot of interviews, and I have concluded that the questions always look alike. I could always give the same answers.		210
Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.		211
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.		212
Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.		213
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.		214
Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.		215
The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.		216
I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres.		217
I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.		218
I'm terrified of writing at night, for then I can't sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and go on into the late afternoon.		219
Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.		220
I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.		221
I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.		222
I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works.		223
Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.		224
I think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality.		225
My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.		226
The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.		301
I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.		302
I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.		303
I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.		304
Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.		305
For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.		306
I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!		307
My university work was not central to my education.		308
Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.		309
Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.		310
Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.		311
New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.		312
I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.		313
Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.		314
In 'Cosmicomics,' I came close to science fiction - I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system.		315
I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.		316
I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.		317
I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.		318
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.		319
Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a full theory of the perfect novel, and that's what stumps me.		320
Bringing a child into the world makes sense only if this child is wanted consciously and freely by its two parents. If it is not, then it is simply animal and criminal behavior.		321
I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.		322

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