Bookmarker is a personal project by @dellsystem to help with retaining reading material. Source on GitHub.

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2 years, 8 months ago

I always think of the pros and cons in everything

But now, once again, I have found a formula for putting something else before writing, namely my need for what I do to make sense as an innovative operation in the present cultural context, to be in some sense something that has never been attempted before, and which represents a further developmen…

—p.230 Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings Behind the Success (221) by Italo Calvino
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2 years, 8 months ago

meeting the needs of a modern Italy

Instead I deepened what had always been my conviction: that what counts is the complexity of a culture in developing its various concrete aspects, in the things produced by labour, in its technical methods for doing things, in experience and knowledge and morality, in the values which become define…

—p.229 Behind the Success (221) by Italo Calvino
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2 years, 8 months ago

we Italian Communists were schizophrenic

[...] But at that time, twenty-four years ago, our perspective on things was more or less that. We Italian Communists were schizophrenic. Yes, I really think that that is the correct term. One side of our minds was and wanted to be a witness to the truth, avenging the wrongs suffered by the weak an…

—p.203 The Summer of ’56 (200) by Italo Calvino
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2 years, 8 months ago

I am a bit Stalinist still

Perhaps politics remains tied in my experience to that extreme situation: a sense of inflexible necessity and a search for the different and the multiple in a rigid world. So I will conclude by saying: if I have been (though very much in my own way) a Stalinist, this was not by chance. There are el…

—p.199 Was I a Stalinist Too? (192) by Italo Calvino
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2 years, 8 months ago

whose limitations I see only too clearly

Every time I try to write a book I have to justify it with a plan or programme, whose limits I quickly realize. So then I put it alongside another project, many other projects, and this ends up in writer’s block. Every time I have to invent, alongside the book I have to write, the author who has to…

—p.186 The Situation in 1978 (184) by Italo Calvino