“Since I have become a slave of writing, the pleasure of reading has ended for me.” — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“What if it were as they say? If, while I believe I am writing in fun, what I write were really dictated… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.” — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.” — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
I'm terrified of writing at night, for then I can't sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and go… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“No, writing has not changed me for the better at all; I have merely used up part of my restless, conscienceless youth.… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people,… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“Memory, or rather experience -- which is the memory of the event plus the wound it has inflicted on you, plus the… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single,… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor. — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“(one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly), whether only for yourself or also for others (often only for yourself,… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: "I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“The naked man had lost hope now; he would never be able to return to the earth's surface;he would never leave the bottom of… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“I ask you to come down to earth," said the Baron in a calm, rather faint voice, "and to take up the duties of… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“... KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be. POLO: And here, in fact, we are.” — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
“Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that… — Italo Calvino Copy Share Image
