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" 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. "

Italo Calvino

Good

America

American

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

" 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. "

Italo Calvino

Myself

Writer

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy. "

" 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. "

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

Italo Calvino

Bourgeois

Guy

" 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. "

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

Italo Calvino

Time

Own

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

" 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. "

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

Italo Calvino

Our

Walls

" Folktales are real. "

Italo Calvino

Real

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

" 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. "

" Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear. "