Quotes from Italo Calvino

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.

I suffer from everyday life.

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

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

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.

We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.

For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.

Now, the old man happened to be the Lord.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

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.

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 obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.

Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

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

Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

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.

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.

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

New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.

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

I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.

...Life is nothing but trading smells.