If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

(for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).

I felt in harmony with the disharmony of others, myself, and the world.)

The story must also work hard to keep up with us, to report a dialogue constructed on the void, speech by speech. For the story, the bridge is not finished: beneath every word there is nothingness.

that privileged relationship with books which is peculiar to the reader: the ability to consider what is written as something finished and definitive, to which there is nothing to be added, from which there is nothing to be removed.

This, too, is an advantage running has over other sports: everybody is on his own and is not required to answer to others.

The house, in its wisdom, seems to have taken advantage of your moments of euphoria to prepare itself to shelter you in your moments of depression.

You are always a possible you.

the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing,

Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against the moments, recovering time?

its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.

Every time I sit down here I read, “It was a dark and stormy night . . .” and the impersonality of that incipit seems to open the passage from one world to the other, from the time and space of here and now to the time and space of the written word;

I am convinced there is nothing better than a conventional opening, an attack from which you can expect everything and nothing; and I realize also that this mythomane dog will never succeed in adding to the first seven words another seven or another twelve without breaking the spell. The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.

I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object.

the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions.