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" 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. "

Italo Calvino

Book

Done

Result

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

" 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. "

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

Italo Calvino

Emotions

Nature

" 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'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. "

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

Italo Calvino

Our

Walls

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

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

Italo Calvino

Time

Own

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

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

" I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works. "

Italo Calvino

Much

Head

" One writes fables in periods of oppression. "

" I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running. "

" Folktales are real. "

Italo Calvino

Real

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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