I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.
— Italo Calvino
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.
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.
I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt for words when I speak, and I have the same difficulty when writing.
I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.
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.
New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.
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.
Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.
I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.
For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.
Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.
What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth?
I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.
The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.
In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.
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.
A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.
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.
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.
I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.
Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.
Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.
One writes fables in periods of oppression.
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.
A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.
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.
An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.
I suffer from everyday life.
I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.
I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.
Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.
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.
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.
Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
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'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.
I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.
I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year.
I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.
Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.
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.
My university work was not central to my education.
I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!
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.
If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.
I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.
Folktales are real.
