“Sections in the bookstore - Books You Haven't Read - Books You Needn't Read - Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading - Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Categ...”
Work
L'impresa di cercare di scrivere romanzi 'apocrifi', cioè che immagino siano scritti da un autore che non sono io e che non esiste, l'ho portata fino in fondo nel mio libro 'Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore'. E un romanzo sul piacere di leggere romanzi; protagonista è il Lettore, che per dieci volte comincia a leggere un libro che per vicissitudini estranee alla sua volontà non riesce a finire. Ho dovuto dunque scrivere l'inizio di dieci romanzi d'autori immaginari, tutti in qualche modo diversi da me e diversi tra loro ... Più che d'identificarmi con l'autore di ognuno dei dieci romanzi, ho cercato d'identificarmi col lettore: rappresentare il piacere della lettura d'un dato genere, più che il testo vero e proprio. Ma soprattutto ho cercato di dare evidenza al fatto che ogni libro nasce in presenza d'altri libri, in rapporto e confronto ad altri libri.
Quotes
Showing 1-11 of 11
Italo Calvino
Canonical work source
“Sections in the bookstore - Books You Haven't Read - Books You Needn't Read - Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading - Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Categ...”
“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...”
“How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not inte...”
“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...”
“What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who though...”
“Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dre...”
“Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a vi...”
“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”
“If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lov...”
“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.”
“You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly...”