Italo Calvino Quotes

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Novelists do not swing on the same pendulums as critics.

A novel is a machine for generating interpretations.

Deconstruction glorifies the critic, humiliates the author, and makes the reader wonder why he bothered.

The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

I don't think any novelist should be concerned with literature.

I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems.

I have never known a novel that was good enough to be good in spite of its being adapted to the author's political views.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

Subject matter is sort of overemphasized in the way books get discussed, I think.

I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing.

To my ear, the term 'comic novelist' is as redundant and off-putting as the term 'literary novelist'.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.