Italo Calvino Quotes

I am always fascinated by the mental struggles that people and characters have.

...he said, with sort of a little derisive smile, "How can you walk down the street with all this stuff going on inside you?" I said, "I don't know how you can walk down the street with nothing going on inside you.

I think you have to know who you are. Get to know the monster that lives in your soul, dive deep into your soul and explore it.

Those things interest me a lot in songwriting - the human nature of how people think, and the muck that we wind up in.

The best characters to play are the ones who have deep internal conflict.

Any voices or fantasies, he lives with. Those are his everyday life things.

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as 'first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds.'

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Everything I have ever written about has been about what's going on inside of us.

I could write songs on the beach, but the interior darkness, we have it all. We have it.

It [film-making] really just has to do with my own ghosts and phantoms. And I have to say, in the end, it's just my way of seeing things.

Sometimes you think the whole world is falling, and it's only yourself that's leaning.

Everyone's a little crazy when you get inside their head... it's only a matter of degree.

To me sympathy for a character has little to do with how morally upstanding or wicked they are. All that really matters for me is how human and interesting they are. I happen to be drawn to characters who operate under intense internal pressure, which often comes from some deep psychological conflict.

The villains are all parts of me. For years I've been wondering what it would be like if all those negative elements were forced onto the main character's side. I can understand a character with that kind of anger.

The worst things weren't outside of you.

The things that make you most mad about the world tend to be the things that you hate in yourself.

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.

Each of us keeps, battened down inside himself, a sort of lunatic giant; impossible socially, but full scale; and it's the knockings and battering we sometimes hear in each other that keep our banter from utter banality.

What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter.

I swim in a pool of my own neurosis. I carry love, grief deeply, like an Irishman.

Might we not say to the confused voices which sometimes arise from the depths of our being: "Ladies, be so kind as to speak only four at a time?"

My blood is alive with many voices telling me I am made of longing.

I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country.

Saw so much of the wickedness of my heart that I longed to get away from myself...I felt almost pressed to death with my own vileness. Oh what a body of death is there in me...Oh the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!