Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than ones mothers womb. – 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
When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign — a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they dont want to hear the word mentioned. – Italo Calvino
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. – Italo Calvino
Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool. Such men have the quaint habit of discovering things fifty years after all the world knows about them — because they read only their own language. – Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962) #bilingual #trilingual