Italo Calvino Quotations

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.

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.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

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.

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

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.

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

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

An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

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

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

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

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

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

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

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

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

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

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

My university work was not central to my education.

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

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

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

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

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

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

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

I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!

I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.

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.

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.

Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.

New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.

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

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at a traffic light, you take the book out of the bag, rip off the transparent wrapping, start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you....

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.

There is no language without deceit.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.