Quotes by Italo Calvino

"One writes fables in periods of oppression."

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

"The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"I suffer from everyday life."

"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."

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

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

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