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" 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. "

Italo Calvino

Knowledge

World

Better

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" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

Italo Calvino

Generation

Strong

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

" Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession. "

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

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

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

" 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 think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality. "

" 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. "

" 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

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

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

Italo Calvino

Bourgeois

Guy

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "