Italo Calvino Quotes

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.

When you take something extremely broad, then it is not a work of expansion or work of compression. It's hard because you have to decide what to throw out.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

I like cutting through complexity and trying to get to the kernel of an idea.

I underwent a whole process of slowly letting go of idiosyncrasies and habits and embellishments and everything extraneous to the essentials that I'm unwilling to let go of. I never dreamed that I would be making black-and-white paintings with so little embellishment. But it's been liberating in many ways to let go of that and yet see what I did want to retain.

Long fiction is wonderful and you can lose yourself in it as a reader and as a writer, but short stories don't allow the same kind of immersion. Often the best stories hold you back and make you witness them. This may be one of the reasons some people reject the form. That and the fact that they are harder work to read. A story will not let you get comfortable and settle in. It is like a stool that is so small that you must always be aware of sitting.

Eliminate the superfluous.

My palate is simpler than it used to be. A young chef adds and adds and adds to the plate. As you get older, you start to take away.

My films have been progressing towards a certain kind of minimalism, even though it was never intended. Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

I cut up loads. I always want everything shorter, shorter, shorter.

The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

Great writers know what to cut out. It's the same in life. Clear ambitions. Clear relationships. This is the stuff of good story.

The trick isn't adding stuff, it's taking away.

In mathematics the complicated things are reduced to simple things. So it is in painting.

There is but one art, to omit.

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.

With greater completeness and abstraction, I have attained a form filtered to its essentials.

People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life.

Believe it or not, it is not only possible to accomplish more by doing less, it is mandatory. Enter the world of elimination.

When in doubt, delete it.

I look at albums like novels. If you write a really good scene or a really good moment, just because you wrote it, doesn't mean that it fits with the story that you're writing.

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.