Quotes from Italo Calvino

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'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.

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.

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'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

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.

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

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.

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

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.

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.

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 change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.