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" 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. "

Italo Calvino

Things

Rather

Public

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

" 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... 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. "

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

" 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. "

" One writes fables in periods of oppression. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

Italo Calvino

Start

I Am

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me. "

Italo Calvino

Emotions

Nature

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

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

Italo Calvino

Our

Walls

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

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

" 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

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