ITALO CALVINO

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.

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?

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

Bringing a child into the world makes sense only if this child is wanted consciously and freely by its two parents. If it is not, then it is simply animal and criminal behavior.

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

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

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.

My university work was not central to my education.

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.

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

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

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