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All Quotes by author - Italo Calvino

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Folktales are real. "

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

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

" 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 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 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 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. "

Political Party

" 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. "

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

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

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

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