Search the Archive

"Year after year, I and thousands of members of PEN [an international association that promotes cooperation among writers in the interests of international goodwill and freedom of expression] voted for…"

"During the last quarter century Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has no…"

"As for Calvino, I have to say honestly that I love especially his earlier work, his stories, his fiction up to and including Invisible Cities—a very beautiful book which I adore. I love less what came…"

"For me Calvino is one of the most wonderful writers, and the magic in his work is something that has been an influence"

"Italo Calvino, in The Uses of Literature, said that "the more technological our houses, the more their walls ooze ghosts." What does that mean? It means that the more abstract our dealings with each o…"

"Both Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges have contributed greatly to our understanding of the fantastic. Calvino in his book, The Uses of Literature says, "I leave the critics the task of placing my n…"

""Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch.""

"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. (di quest'onda che rifluisce dai ricordi la città s'imbeve coma una spugna e si dilata). The city, however, does no…"

"«What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space»"

"I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anyth…"

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful—the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of p…"

"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. . The city, however, does not tell of its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand..."

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is commun…"

"And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and egg…"

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape …"

"Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outsi…"

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of …"

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books …"

"What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space"

"And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing…"

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it…"

"Gore is a man without an unconscious."

"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking an…"