Italo Calvino Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.”

“It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.”

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”