Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvinowas an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics collection of short stories, and the novels Invisible Citiesand If on a winter's night a traveler...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth15 October 1923
CountryItaly
space giving inferno
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
mean giving literature
My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
book giving world
The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.
reading giving special
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
cities giving delight
You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
two space giving
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
book books-and-reading breaks reading rip start storm traffic waiting wheel
You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at a traffic light, you take the book out of the bag, rip off the transparent wrapping, start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you....
critical foresee full novels ten theory
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.
brief collected composed novelist overall structure texts various
I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.
late politics society
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.
certain collective convinced order solve work
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.
becoming figure public
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.
fit ought precise
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.
bringing child criminal freely simply
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.