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
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary. – Italo Calvino
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. – 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
Im not a good father and theyre not children any more the eldest is in his fifties. My relationship with their mothers broke down and, because of what the law was, they went with their mothers and were imbued with their mothers morality in life and they were not my people any more. – Wilbur Smith