{"author":"Italo Calvino","author_id":"Italo+Calvino","total_quotes":104,"quotes":[{"text":"It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ...","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["baron-in-the-trees","fiction","italian"],"id":528,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"Don't you ever get tired of reading?' she asked. 'You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?' she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening.","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["bad-idea","lectophilia","mixed-marriages-never-work","reading","relationship-nightmare","run-away"],"id":852,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages,the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success,the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment,the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case,the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified,Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["books","lists"],"id":5940,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["power"],"id":16750,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"What matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["authenticity","collaboration","truth"],"id":19025,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the 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.","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["bookstores","literature","postmodernism","reading"],"id":26001,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["writers"],"id":26487,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["myself","today","writing "],"id":28801,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"I've been in love for five hundred million years….","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["evolution","love","million"],"id":32208,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"},{"text":"A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes — as it is already to a large extent — no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a “free-range” warren but a “battery” one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed.","author":"Italo Calvino","tags":["abortion","human-life","responsibility"],"id":34600,"author_id":"Italo+Calvino"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":104,"pages":11,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}