It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
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.
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.
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.
I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.
I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.
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.
I suffer from everyday life.
Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.
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 have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.
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.
A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.
One writes fables in periods of oppression.
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres.
My university work was not central to my education.
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.
I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.
If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.
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.
An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.
Folktales are real.
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.
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.
I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.
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.
I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year.
I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.
The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.
Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.
A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.
Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.
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 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'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.
Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.
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 will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!
