Italo Calvino 💫💎💫

 

October 15, 1923, Italo Calvino is born.

"I love Stendhal above all because only in him are individual moral tension, historical tension, the impetus of life one and the same, linear novelistic tension.

I love Hemingway because he is matter of fact, understatement, the will to happiness, sadness.

I love Pushkin because he is clarity, irony and seriousness.

I love Stevenson because he seems to fly.

I love Conrad because he navigates the abyss and does not sink.

I love Chekhov because he does not go beyond where he goes.

I love Tolstoy because sometimes I feel like I am on the verge of understanding how he does it and instead nothing.

I love Manzoni because until recently I hated him.

I love Flaubert because after him you can no longer think of doing as he did.

I love Poe of The Gold-Bug.

I love Twain of Huckleberry Finn.

I love Kipling of The Jungle Books.

I love Nievo because I have reread it many times enjoying it as much as the first time.

I love Jane Austen because I do not read her never but I'm glad he's there.

I love Gogol because he distorts with clarity, malice and measure.

I love Dostoevsky because he distorts with coherence, fury and without measure.

I love Balzac because he is a visionary.

I love Kafka because he is a realist.

I love Maupassant because he is superficial.

I love Mansfield because she is intelligent.

I love Fitzgerald because he is dissatisfied.

I love Radiguet because youth never returns.

I love Svevo because one must grow old.

I love..."

Italo Calvino, from the preface to Why Read the Classics, 1991.

The beautiful portrait of Calvino is the work of Tullio Pericoli

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