Italo Calvino Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Italo Calvino:

I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.

New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

Folktales are real.

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.

Italo Calvino

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

Italo Calvino

I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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

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

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.

Italo Calvino

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

Italo Calvino

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

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.

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.

Italo Calvino

I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.

Italo Calvino

I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

Italo Calvino

Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

Italo Calvino

I suffer from everyday life.

Italo Calvino

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

Italo Calvino

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

Italo Calvino