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Reading Calvino, you're constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you've never thought of it before. This is highly unnerving; fortunately, you're usually too busy laughing to go mad. I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, Britain burns, while the world ends
--
Salman Rushdie, in Marowski, Daniel G. (Ed.); Stine, Jean C. (Ed.); Rushdie, Salman (1985), Contemporary Literary Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Today's Novelists, Volym 33, Gale, pp. 97, ISBN 0810344076 

 

Italo Calvino

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I'm really serious about this writing thing. What time I haven't been writing, I've been reading: Thomas Wolfe, if you know who he is. His writing is mostly built about the central character of a writer, himself. Altho it's fiction, it deals with his life and experiences. In my opinion, little as it's worth, he is the greatest writer that has lived, Shakespeare included. He is a genius.

 

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For human nature, being more highly pitched, selved, and distinctive than anything in the world, can have been developed, evolved, condensed, from the vastness of the world not anyhow or by the working of common powers but only by one of finer or higher pitch and determination than itself.

 

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I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer. Because it's the only apprenticeship we have. It's the only way of learning how to write a story.

 

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