Italo Calvino Quotes

So many of my books, I don't want to say they have messages, but they have important things to say.

As a novelist, you write about social mores, but not everything can be explained.

When people are committed to things, and the world view they have is no longer in alignment with our world view, then it becomes funny.

Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture.

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.

Your political views really denote your spiritual views.

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

Ideology... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.

Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.

The political is the moral and the moral is the political.

How we behave in our public lives inevitably reflects values, attitudes and experiences embedded in our private lives and vice versa.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

The great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions.

I never write something and consciously embed political commentary or any other kind of commentary. I just try to get the characters into a room or out of a room, or onto the plane, or through the grocery store. The political stuff, the class stuff, the gender stuff, is in the air, it's in their interactions, because it's there for all of us.

'Ida' doesn't set out to explain history. That's not what it's about. The story is focused on very concrete and complex characters who are full of humanity with all its paradoxes. They're not pawns used to illustrate some version of history or an ideology.

Politics moves upward into ethics, and ethics ascends to theology.

All the things we value in society don't mean much in fiction.

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly

What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?

All films are political, whether they mean to be or not. Star Wars is political. As soon as you have conflict, which is the key to most films, you have politics. It's just that some are more artful with the handling of politics than others.

I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.

The primary subject of fiction is and has always been human emotion, values, and beliefs.

I don't subscribe to relativism, whether it's in political philosophy, foreign policy or in life.

I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture. It's one thing to mess stuff up and break stuff, but [Borat] is really pointing out the ideology of America. It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.