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"Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again."
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"Musicians do not get on stage without hearing the song singing inside of them. Poets do not write as if they are jotting down a sermon, they see everything in their subconscious before presenting it to the conscious, which they later turn to readable materials. Artist do not draw and paint without painting in dream states, trance, or see an art form that others do not see. Being creative does not calls for being any supernatural entity, but in creating with the entities inside of you."
"I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory largely held by the devil.I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil. You discover your audience at the same time and in the same way that you discover your subject, but it is an added blow."
"Unfortunately, bureaucratic problems at the federal level are causing many other small Washington companies to be denied federal funding that would help transfer their ideas from their laboratories into our homes and hospitals."
"But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good."
"My home is attached to a study - in fact, my home is my study, and I have a little room to sleep in. I need to write looking onto the street or a landscape. Looking at reality from some distance gives me romantic visions."
"Actually ideas are everywhere. It's the paperwork, that is, sitting down and thinking them into a coherent story, trying to find just the right words, that can and usually does get to be labor."
"Now is not the time for bigots and racists. No time for sexists and homophobes. Now, more than ever, is the time for ARTISTS. It's time for us to rise above and to create. To show humanity. To spread hope. We must prevent society from destroying itself, from losing its way. Now is the time for love."
"Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context."
"You know you're writing well when you're throwing good stuff into the wastebasket."
Explore more quotes by Italo Calvino
"In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time."
"Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?"
"It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books."
"If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness."
"Reading,' he says, 'is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead....''Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desire, feared, possible or impossible,' Ludmilla says. 'Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be...."
"The seventh reader interrupts you: 'Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.'You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla."
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