Quotes from Italo Calvino

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.

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

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

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

Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

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.

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

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

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

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.

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.

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

I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.

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.

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

I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!

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.

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

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.

Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.