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.

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

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.

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

I suffer from everyday life.

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.

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

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

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

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.