The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines. – Italo Calvino
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? – Italo Calvino
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
Every morning I tell myself, ‘Today has to be productive’ – and then something happens that prevents me from writing. – Italo Calvino
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. – Italo Calvino
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. – 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
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. – Italo Calvino
Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself. – Italo Calvino
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
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. – Italo Calvino
I have spent more time with other people’s books than with my own. I do not regret it. – Italo Calvino
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. – Italo Calvino
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. – Italo Calvino
Of course, I’m of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences. – Italo Calvino
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. – Italo Calvino
A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal. – Italo Calvino
