Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst. – Italo Calvino
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following ones nose, taking shortcuts. – Italo Calvino
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city. – Italo Calvino
I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. – Italo Calvino
Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader. – Neville Cardus