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.
— Italo Calvino
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 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.
I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.
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.
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.
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.
I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.
Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.
I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres.
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.
Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.
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.
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.
The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.
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.
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.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
