Italo Calvino

I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!

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.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

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.

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.

Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.

My university work was not central to my education.

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

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.

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

I suffer from everyday life.

If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

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?

I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.

Folktales are real.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.

In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

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.

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.

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.

Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.

A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

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.

The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.

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.

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.

Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.

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.

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.

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.

I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.

I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.

I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.

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.

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.

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.

Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.

Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres.

I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year.

Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.

I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.