Italo Calvino Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.”

“What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.”

“Folktales are real.”

“One writes fables in periods of oppression.”

“I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.”

“I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres.”