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" 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. "

Italo Calvino

Rules

Trying

Short

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

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

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

" 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. "

Italo Calvino

Time

Fiction

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

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

Italo Calvino

Time

Own

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Italo Calvino

Story

Try

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

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

Italo Calvino

Generation

Strong

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

" I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah! "

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

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

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

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

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

Italo Calvino

Emotions

Nature

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

" 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. "

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

" 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