Top 44 Italo Calvino Quotes

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

Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

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

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.

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

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then… I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

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

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

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

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.

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

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

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

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 think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality.

Every morning I tell myself, ‘Today has to be productive’ – and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

I’m afraid I don’t think I really have a life on which something can be written.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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 don’t believe chance can play a role in my literature.

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

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.

I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!

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

Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.

I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.

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.

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.

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.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

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.

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