Italo Calvino

I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.

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

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

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.

Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.