Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings

Italo Calvino

“What counts is what we are, and the way we deepen our relationship with the world and with others, a relationship that can be one of both love for all that exists and of desire for its transformation.”

Italo Calvino on racial justice – his moving account of the early civil rights movement and his encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Difficult Loves

Italo Calvino

“The life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.”

Italo Calvino on photography and the art of presence – triply timely today:

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Italo Calvino

“The idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well.”

Italo Calvino on the unbearable lightness of language, literature, and life – metaphorical magic and wisdom from his final legacy, the Harvard lectures he wrote shortly before his death in 1985 and never got to deliver:

Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985

Italo Calvino

“To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being just as Proust, Radiguet and Fitzgerald did: what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.”

Italo Calvino on writing – timeless wisdom culled from 40+ years of his freshly published letters

Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985

Italo Calvino

“A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.”

Italo Calvino on abortion and the true meaning of life, in a letter nearly 40 years old yet timelier than ever: