Quotes by "Italo Calvino"

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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 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.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

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 suffer from everyday life.

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

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

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

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

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

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

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

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

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