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Italo Calvino


Italian
October 15, 1923
Journalist
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Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.


Italo Calvino
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An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.


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


Italo Calvino
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In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.


Italo Calvino
Tags: Who Person Woman
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Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.


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


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


Italo Calvino
Tags: Up Grew Course
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The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.


Italo Calvino
Tags: Who His Someone
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I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.


Italo Calvino
Tags: Good You Life
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
Italo Calvino
Tags: Who Some Those
Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.
Italo Calvino
Tags: Best Chance About
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Italo Calvino
Tags: Which Much First
I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.
Italo Calvino
Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.
Italo Calvino
Tags: Way Which Through
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.
Italo Calvino
Tags: Morning Go Then
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
Tags: Like Am I Am
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.
Italo Calvino
Tags: Think More Know
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
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.
Italo Calvino
Tags: People Will Love
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.
Italo Calvino
Tags: Work More Up
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.
Italo Calvino
Tags: World Only Then
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
Tags: Like Who Really
I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.
Italo Calvino
Tags: Who Any Few
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
The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
Tags: You Me Think