Italo Calvino

Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

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.

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.

The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.