On friend and author Gore Vidal, as quoted in 'GORE VIDAL, 1925-2012 : Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer' in The New York Times (1 August 2012).

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), 'Lightness'.

The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with 'bits' in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware.

English translation: Patrick Creagh (1996).

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988).

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language.

The Baron in the Trees (1957), Chapter 16 English translation: Archibald Colquhoun (1959).

He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful-the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.English translation: Archibald Colquhoun (1957), HarperCollins.The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), Preface.And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it but you can never eliminate it. Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance.Įverything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. I set my hand to the art of writing early on.1.3 If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).

Italo calvino art