Short story writers from Italy

"Many men on the point of an edifying death would be furious if they were suddenly restored to health."

"For some time my friend Doro and I had agreed that I would be his guest. I was very fond of Doro, and when he married and went to Genoa to live, I was half sick over it. When I wrote to refuse his invitation to the wedding, I got a dry and rather haughty note replying that if his money wasn't good for establishing himself in a city that pleased his wife, he didn't know what it was good for. Then, one fine day as I was passing through Genoa I stopped at his house and we made peace. I liked his wife very much, a tomboy type who graciously asked me to call her Clelia and left us alone as much as she should, and when she showed up again in the evening to go out with us, she had become a charming woman whose hand I would have kissed had I been anyone else but myself."

"We were at the age when a friend's conversation seems like oneself talking, when one shares a life in common the way I still think, bachelor though I am, some married couples are able to live."

"What's got into your head? That I'm returning to my origins? The important things I have in my blood and nobody is going to take them away. I'm here to drink a bottle of my wine and sing a little–with anybody."

"Don't mix wine and women, Doro."

"See, you're like all the others. But don't you understand that we can't quarrel? We love each other. If I could hate him the way I hate myself, then of course I would abuse him. But neither of us deserves it. See?"

"If all this were true, how easy it would be to understand people."

"What doesn't slumber under the shells of us all? One just needs courage to uncover it and be oneself. Or at least to discuss it. There isn't enough discussion in the world."

"I've discovered nothing. but do you remember how much we talked when we were boys? We talked just for the fun of it. We knew very well it was only talk, but still we enjoyed it."

"You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young."

"All of them, all those idiots who force their brains and don't know when to stop."

"I started explaining to her that nothing is vulgar in itself but that talking and thinking make it so."

"But all years are stupid. It's only when they're over that they become interesting."

"For a long time we had talked of the hill as we might have talked of the sea or the woods. I used to go back there in the evening from the city when it grew dusk, and for me it was not just another place but a point of view, a way of life. For instance, I saw no difference between those hills and these ancient ones where I played as a child and where I live now: the same broken, straggling country, cultivated and wild, the same roads, farmhouses, and ravines. I used to climb up there in the evening as if I too were fleeing the nightly shock of the air-raid alarms."

"I was happy enough; I knew that during the night the whole city might go up in flames and all its people be killed, but the ravines, houses, and footpaths would wake in the morning calm and unchanged."

"The courage to stand alone as if others didn't exist and think only of what you're doing. Not to get scared if people ignore you. You have to wait for years, have to die. Then after you're dead, if you're lucky, you become somebody."

"It's pointless to cry. One is born and dies alone..."

"That war in which I had been sheltering, convinced of having accepted it, of having made my own uncomfortable peace, grew more ferocious, bit deeper, reached into one's nerves and brain."

"There is something indecent in words."

"Not believing in anything is also a religion."

"Even today I wonder why those Germans didn't wait for me at the villa and send someone to look for me in Turin. It is because of their failure that I am still free and up here. Why I should have been saved and not Gallo, or Tono, or Cate, I don't know. Perhaps because I'm supposed to suffer for others? Because I'm the most useless and don't deserve anything, not even punishment? Because I went into a church that time? The experience of danger creates more cowards every day. It makes one stupid. I have reached the point of being alive only by chance, when many better men than I are dead, I don't like it, it's not enough. At time, after having listened to the useless radio and looked through the windows at the empty vineyards, I think that living by accident is not living, and I wonder if have really escaped."

"But I have seen the unknown dead, those little men of the Republic. It was they who woke me up. If a stranger, an enemy, becomes a thing like that when he dies, if one stops short and is afraid to walk over him, it means that even beaten our enemy is someone, that after having shed his blood, one must placate it, give this blood a voice, justify the man who shed it. Looking at certain dead is humiliating. One has the impression that the same fate that threw these bodies to the ground holds us nailed to the spot to see them, to fill our eyes with the sight. It's not fear, not our usual cowardice. One feels humiliated because one understands–touching it with one's eyes–that we might be in their place ourselves: there would be no difference, and if we live we owe it to this dirtied corpse. That is why every war is a civil war; every fallen man resembles one who remains and calls him to account."

"I don't believe it can end. Now that I've seen what war is, what civil war is, I know that everybody, if one day it should end, ought to ask himself: "And what shall we make of the fallen? Why are they dead?" I wouldn't know what to say. Not now, at any rate. Nor does it seem to me that the others know. Perhaps only dead know, and only for them is the war really over."

"But she didn't laugh. "When you have children," she said, staring at her glass, "you accept life. Do you accept life?""

"She didn't seem dead. There was only a swelling of the lips, as if she were angry. The strange thing was her idea of renting a painter's studio, having an armchiar, no less, drawn up s she could die in front of the window that looked toward Superga. A cat had given her away–it was in the room with her, and the next day, miaowing and scratching the door, it had made them open."

"We were very young. I don't think I ever slept that year, but I had a friend who slept even less than I did. Some mornings you could see him strolling up and down in front of the station when the first trains were arriving and leaving."

"Are you or aren't you convinced that weakness is a man's condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven't fallen first?"

"There's nothing that tastes of death more than the summer sun, the powerful light, exuberant nature. You sniff the air and listen to the woods and know that the plants and animals don't give a damn about you. Everything lives and consumes itself. Nature is death..."

"I thought of how many places there are in the world that belong in this way to someone, who has it in his blood beyond anyone else's understanding."

"Don't you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It's no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It's called destiny."

"Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?"

"There is a reason why I came back to this place—came back here instead of to Canelli, Barbaresco or Alba. It is almost certain that I was not born here; where I was born I don't know. There is not a house or a bit of ground or a handful of dust hereabouts of which I can say: "This was me before I was born.""

"That you need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you."

"It wasn't a country where a man could settle down and rest his head and say to the others, "Here I am for good or ill. For good or ill let me leave in peace." This was what was frightening."

"The real affliction of old age is remorse."

"What use is this valley to a family that comes from across the sea and knows nothing about the moon and the bonfires? You must have grown up there and have in in your bones, like wine and polenta, and then you know it without needing to speak about it and everything you have carried about inside you for so many years without knowing awakens now at the rattle of the chain on a cart, at the swish of an ox' tail, at the taste of a bowl of minestra, at the sound of a voice heard in the square at night."

"Nuto, who had never really gone away, still wanted to understand the world and change it, and upset the cycle of the seasons. Or perhaps he didn't, and still believed only in the moon. But I, who didn't believe in the moon, knew that when all was said and done only the seasons matter and they are in your bones and they nurtured you when you were a boy."

"The whole plain was like a battlefield—or a farmyard. There was a reddish light and I jumped down, cramped and stiff with cold; a sliver of moon was piercing the low clouds and it looked like a gash from a knife and bathed the plain in a blood-red light. I stayed looking at it for a while. It terrified me."

"Even then he had those piercing cat's eyes of his and when he had said something, finished up by saying: "If I'm wrong, put me right." And so I began to understand that you didn't speak for the sake of speaking, to say that you had done this or that, what you had eaten or drunk, but to work out an idea, to find out what makes the world go round."

"He told me that it isn't what you do but how you do it that shows whether you are clever or not."

"He told them it was only dogs that bark and go for strange dogs, and men set on a dog because it suits them to show that they are still masters, but if the dogs weren't dumb animals they would come to an agreements with each other and start barking at them."

"At a certain point the two cigars fell at our feet in the snow and then we heard them whispering up there and moving about and then came a sigh louder than the others. When we looked up we could see nothing but the withered vine leaves and thousands of stars in the frosty sky. Nuto said "The blackguards" through his clenched teeth."

"Maybe it's better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again."

"People who don't know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don't understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists."

"I realised that Nuto was quite right when he said that to live in a hovel or in a palace was one and the same thing, that blood is the same colour everywhere, and that everybody wants to be rich and in love and make their fortune."

"Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast."

"What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it."

"What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence."

"Consider this point carefully: nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission."

"When a man mourns for someone who has played him false, it is not for love of her, but for his own humiliation at not having deserved her trust."

"Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared."

"If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight—they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves."

"The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment. When this sensation is lacking—as when one is in prison, or ill, or stupid, or when living has become a habit—one might as well be dead."

"But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever."

"Every woman longs for a man friend to confide in, to fill the empty hours when the one she loves is away; she insists that this friend does not affect her love for the absent one; she takes offense if he makes any demand that might interfere with her love; but if that friend grows cautious and keeps his words and glances under control, with the sole object of saving himself further suffering, then the woman — any woman — immediately does her best to increase her hold upon him so that she can watch him suffer. And she does not even realize she is doing it. Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one's own pleasure is shared. It is amazing that the woman you love may tell you her days are empty and unbearable, but yet she has no wish to know what yours are like.* // 17th November 1937."

"A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself."

"It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point."

"This much is certain: you can have anything in life except a wife to call you "her man." And till now all your life was based on that hope."

"The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies."

"La difficoltà di commettere suicidio sta in questo: è un atto di ambizione che si può commettere solo quando si sia superata ogni ambizione."

"Why does a man who is truly in love insist that this relationship must continue and be "lifelong"? Because life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic. Who would want to wake up halfway through an operation?"

"A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience."

"Because, to despise money, one must have plenty of it."

"Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman."

"To avenge a wrong done to you, is to rob yourself of the comfort of crying out against the injustice of it."

"No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide."

"When one has made a mistake, one says. "Another time I shall know what to do," when one should say is: "I already know what I shall really do another time.""

"Since God could have created a freedom in which there could be no evil (i.e., a state when men were happy and free and certain not to sin), it follows that He wished evil to exist. But evil offends Him. A commonplace case of masochism."

"The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else's."

"Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose."

"All our "most sacred affections" are merely prosaic habit."

"We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God."

"Men who have a tempestuous inner life and do not seek to give vent to it by talking or writing are simply men who have no tempestuous inner life. Give company to a lonely man and he will talk more than anyone."

"All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition."

"The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows."

"You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering."

"It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her."

"It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it."

"Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality."

"Misfortunes cannot suffice to make a fool into an intelligent man."

"I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company."

"What we desire is not to possess a woman, but to be the only one to possess her."

"When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves."

"Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours short and the years long."

"The most banal thing, discovered in ourselves, becomes intensely interesting. It is no longer an abstract banality, but an amazing co-ordination between reality and our own individuality."

"No matter how much a young man likes to think for himself, he is always trying to model himself on some abstract pattern largely derived from the example of the world around him. And a man, no matter how conservative, shows his own worth by his personal deviation from that pattern."

"The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one's own loneliness, how to communicate with others."

"War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values."

"We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites."

"Love is the cheapest of religions."

"Things which cost nothing are those which cost the most. Why? Because they cost us the effort of understanding that they are free."

"In general, the man who is readily disposed to sacrifice himself is one who does not know how else to give meaning to his life. The profession of enthusiasm is the most sickening of all insincerities."

"If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!"

"Generations do not age. Every youth of any period, any civilization, has the same possibilities as always."

"A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end."

"Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven."

"We do not remember days, we remember moments."

"We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word."

"Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace."

"A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work."

"The really clever thing, in affairs of this sort, is not to win a woman already desired by everyone, but to discover such a prize while she is still unknown."

"There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first."

"Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other's sight, but in their own."

"Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed."

"We obtain things when we no longer want them."

"A decision, an action, are infallible omens of what we shall do another time, not for any vague, mystic, astrological reason but because they result from an automatic reaction that will repeat itself."

"No woman marries for money: they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him."

"When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her."

"Things are revealed through the memories we have of them. Remembering a thing means seeing it—only then—for the first time."

"In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid."

"Love is desire for knowledge."

"There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him."

"The problem is not the harshness of Fate, for anything we want strongly enough we get. The trouble is rather that when we have it we grow sick of it, and then we should never blame Fate, only our own desire."

"When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end."

"Narrating incredible things as though they were real—old system; narrating realities as though they were incredible—the new."

"In fact a man in love or one consumed with hatred creates symbols for himself, as a superstitious man does, from a passion of conferring uniqueness on things or persons. A man who knows nothing of symbols is one of Dante's sluggards. This is why art mirrors itself in primitive rites or strong passions, seeking for symbols, revolving round the primitive taste for savagery, for what is irrational (blood and sex)."

"The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten."

"There is nothing fine about being a child: it is fine, when we are old, too look back to when we were children."

"We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it."

"How can you have confidence in a woman who will not risk entrusting her whole life to you, day and night?"

"Certainly, to have a woman who waits at home for you, who will sleep with you, gives a warm feeling like having something you must say; it makes you glow, keeps you company, helps you to live."

"There is no finer revenge than that which others inflict on your enemy. Moreover, it has the advantage of leaving you the role of a generous man."

"Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd."

"Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible."

"There is only one pleasure—that of being alive. All the rest is misery."

"We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest."

"The problems that agitate one generation are exstinguished for the next, not because they have been solved but because the general lack of interest sweeps them away."

"It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny."

"The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess."

"The act—the act—must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark."

"Nothing can be added to the rest, to the past. We always begin afresh. One nail drives out another. But four nails make a cross."

"Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism."

"The thing most feared in secret always happens. I write: oh Thou, have mercy. And then? All it takes is a little courage. The more the pain grows clear and definite, the more the instinct for life asserts itself and the thought of suicide recedes. It seemed easy when I thought of it. Weak women have done it. It takes humility, not pride. All this is sickening. Not words. An act. I won't write any more."

"I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance. Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb. Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it."

"He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful—the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality."

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."

"Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits."

"Gore is a man without an unconscious."

"What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space"

"And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward with the rolling pin over the dough, her bosom leaning over the great mound of flour and eggs, [...] and we thought of the space the flour would occupy, and the wheat for the flour, and the fields to raise the wheat, and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields; [...] of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0 was uttering those words: "… ah, what noodles, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light-years and light-centuries and billions of light-millennia, and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe, [...] and she, dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!," a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0s, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss."

"And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines...."

"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. (di quest'onda che rifluisce dai ricordi la città s'imbeve coma una spugna e si dilata). The city, however, does not tell of its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand..."

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else."

"Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."

"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:"

"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be."

"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."

"Both Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges have contributed greatly to our understanding of the fantastic. Calvino in his book, The Uses of Literature says, "I leave the critics the task of placing my novels and short stories within or outside of some classification of Fantasy. For me, the main thing in a narrative is not the explanation of an extraordinary event, but the order of things that this extraordinary event produces in itself and around it; the patterns of symmetry, the network of images deposited around it as in the formation of a crystal." (The Uses of Literature, New York: Norton, 1979, p. 73)"

"Italo Calvino, in The Uses of Literature, said that "the more technological our houses, the more their walls ooze ghosts." What does that mean? It means that the more abstract our dealings with each other, the more mysteries are created. The more mysteries, the more questions, and that's where the storyteller steps in."

"For me Calvino is one of the most wonderful writers, and the magic in his work is something that has been an influence"

"As for Calvino, I have to say honestly that I love especially his earlier work, his stories, his fiction up to and including Invisible Cities—a very beautiful book which I adore. I love less what came after Invisible Cities. The more recent work seems to me too cerebral. But then, that’s just my personal preference, and it is hard to convince readers about what is most authentic in someone’s work. Recently a book by Calvino was published posthumously, a book called La Strada di San Giovanni. In this book there is a beautiful story—the title story, in fact—which is a sort of memoir written in 1965 or so—which he never thought to publish. And there are other wonderful pieces in that collection."

"During the last quarter century Italo Calvino has advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries. As they continue to look for the place where the spiders make their nests, Calvino has not only found this special place but learned how himself to make fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere."

"Year after year, I and thousands of members of PEN [an international association that promotes cooperation among writers in the interests of international goodwill and freedom of expression] voted for Jorge Luis Borges, who was the obvious international candidate for the Nobel. They would not consider him. They didn't like his politics. I was shocked that Italo Calvino never got it. It seems they never give it to the really risky writers."

"There is an assumption that everything called genre is secondary. This is simply untrue. Are writers such as Marquez, Borges, or Calvino automatically second-rate because they aren't writing realistic literature or mainstream fiction?"

"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"

"Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi."

"Un palazzo del quale si conoscessero tutte le stanze non era degno di essere abitato."

"Un contadino che mi dà il suo pezzo di pecorino mi fa un regalo più grande di Giulio Làscari quando m’invita a pranzo. Il guaio è che il pecorino mi dà la nausea; e così non resta che la gratitudine che non si vede e il naso arricciato dal disgusto che si vede fin troppo."

"Che cosa se ne farebbe il Senato di me, di un legislatore inesperto cui manca la facoltà d'ingannare sé stesso, questo requisito essenziale per chi voglia guidare gli altri?"

"Noi fummo i Gattopardi, i Leoni; quelli che ci sostituiranno saranno gli sciacalletti, le iene; e tutti quanti Gattopardi, sciacalli e pecore, continueremo a crederci il sale della terra."

"I giovani sentono i dolori più acerbamente dei vecchi: per questi l'uscita di sicurezza è più vicina."

"His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life – an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are, close to one, which someone else's touch may open."

"Perhaps the greatest novel of the century."

"No nineteenth-century writer could have written this nineteenth-century tale; but few twentieth-century writers could have handled its simplicities in the way this one does."

"Quando non si è sinceri bisogna fingere, a forza di fingere si finisce per credere; questo è il principio di ogni fede."

"Un male incerto provoca inquietudine, perché, in fondo, si spera fino all'ultimo che non sia vero; ma un male sicuro, invece, infonde per qualche tempo una squallida tranquillità."

"Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand."

"In principio, dunque, era la noia, volgarmente chiamata caos. Iddio, annoiandosi della noia, creò la terra, il cielo, l'acqua, gli animali, le piante, Adamo ed Èva; i quali ultimi, annoiandosi a loro volta in paradiso, mangiarono il frutto proibito. Iddio si annoiò di loro e li cacciò dall'Eden."

"We were good friends. The news of his recent death hit me hard. I still feel the pain of his loss. And of course I remember how I responded to his early writing. When I was very young Gli Indifferenti was of crucial importance as I formed my first views about writing. I’d have to say that for me Moravia’s earlier work was also his strongest. I love the work up to and including Roman Stories. I think he thought they were perhaps too popular, too much in the mode of a sort of national narrative. Whereas for me the stories in this collection are extraordinary. He managed in that book to depersonalize himself in a masterful way...by that I mean that he recreated himself in the form of many different characters in such a convincing way. His gift for getting inside the personality of characters so totally different from himself was truly remarkable. This was a gift comparable to that of Maupassant, a writer who managed to get inside many diverse characters at a time, so as to paint a complete fresco of the France of his period, of the life of the peasants, of the servants, of the city and of the provinces. He was a really great writer who is absolutely forgotten now. I would like somehow to bring him back. (PG: Is his work translated into Italian?) NG: Yes, but now it is totally ignored. There is a work of his which I particularly love, a novel called A Life, which I’m in the process of translating now."

"Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place."

"What struck me most about the Russian Communists, even in such really exceptional personalities as Lenin and Trotsky, was their utter incapacity to be fair in discussing opinions that conflicted with their own. The adversary, simply for daring to contradict, at once became a traitor, an opportunist, a hireling. An adversary in good faith is inconceivable to the Russian Communists. What an aberration of conscience this is, for so-called materialists and rationalists absolutely in their polemics to uphold the primacy of morals over intelligence! To find a comparable infatuation one has to go back to the Inquisition."

""Political regimes come and go, but bad habits endure." (alt trans = 'remain')"

"This reminded me of what Ignazio Silone said in 1945 soon after he returned to Italy from his Zurich exile: "The Fascism of tomorrow will never say 'I am Fascism.' It will say: 'I am anti-Fascism.'""

"Non perder tempo chi cerca aver fama, voglia acquistar grazia di sua dama."

"I was born near the Po and it is the only respectable river in all Italy. To be respectable, a river must flow through a plain because water was created to stay horizontal and only when it is perfectly horizontal does it preserve its natural dignity. Niagara falls is an embarrassing phenomenon, like a man who walks on his hands."

"Minutes and seconds are strictly city preoccupations. In the city people hurry, hurry so as not to waste a single minute, and fail to realize that they are throwing a lifetime away."

"The party delegate was one of those gloomy, tight-lipped persons who seem to have been made for wearing a red scarf round the neck and a tommy-gun slung from one shoulder."

"Those were the days when there was a great deal of argument about that piece of international machinery known as the ‘Atlantic Pact’, which may have owed its name to the fact that between words and deeds there lies the breadth of an ocean."

"But the young people of today are benighted creatures born with telephone numbers imprinted on their brains, and where passion is concerned they have about as much grace as a pig in a cornfield."

"In the valley a bicycle is just as necessary as a pair of shoes, in fact more so. Because even if a man hasn’t any shoes he can still ride a bicycle, whereas if he hasn’t a bicycle he must surely travel on foot."

"‘Don Camillo, the system of teaching Christian charity by knocking people over the head is one that doesn’t appeal to me,’ the Lord answered severely."

"Italian humorist Giovanni Guareschi–a staunch anti-communist journalist and writer–coined a famous sentence to mock Stalinists “Contrordine, compagni!”, i.e., “Counter-order, comrades!”. It was the sudden announcement of an impromptu change in policies and ideas that activists ought to support with the same enthusiasm and dedication they previously displayed for their blatant contrary. Guareschi’s amusing assumption was that, no matter what, communists dully obey whatever kind of order comes from the party, inhaling the “official truth” (even typos in articles and manifestos) from a “third nostril” that nature provided them with."

"they laughed a little and were very friendly together, the three of them, Anna, Emanuele and Giustino; and they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.”"

"Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water."

"But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart."

"Groups? Movements? I don’t really think these groups exist. I don’t think in Italy there even are such things as currents or trends. The whole scene is really much too chaotic for such groups to form and stay together as separate entities."

"(Are there other English language writers who mean a lot to you?) NG: Well, of course, Shakespeare. And I love George Eliot as well. I’ve read the major authors, but in Italian, not English. Perhaps my favorite English novelist is Jane Austen. I hardly know contemporary American literature. The two American authors I love most, who are by now dead, alas, are Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. And then I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...When Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology came out in Italian, suddenly there was widespread interest in North American writing. But even before that Pavese was busy introducing us all to the great American writers."

"dialect is really impossible to translate adequately."

"I’m not really a poet. It’s only once in a while that what I have to say seems to find its best expression in a poem. But I do read a number of poets—Montale, Sandro Penna, Sabba."

"(there must have been other writers whom you regarded as models.) NG: In my adolescence, the Russians were tremendously important to me. More than anyone, Chekhov. Of the Italians, Svevo, the Moravia of Gli Indifferenti. When I started writing these were the writers I kept before me."

"Style is not something that can be improvised: one has to construct it, to make it."

"in my own work...there’s an important sense of the visual, of the visualized. I see it all so vividly. It’s not that I don’t see what I imagine. If I don’t see it then I can’t write anything."

"My Jewish identity became extremely important to me from the moment the Jews began to be persecuted. At that point I became aware of myself as a Jew. But I came from a mixed marriage—my father was Jewish, my mother Catholic. My parents were atheists and therefore chose not to give us, the children, any religious instruction. They were totally non-observant. You might say that a Hebrew spirit dominated the household in the sense that my father had a very strong, very authoritarian character. And I suppose it’s true that many of the family friends were Jews, but many were not. So, while I did not have any sort of formal Jewish upbringing, I nevertheless felt my Jewishness very acutely during the war years (my first husband, Leone Ginzburg, was a Jew) and after the war, when it became known what had been done to the Jews in the camps by the Nazis. Suddenly my Jewishness became very important to me."

"for a mistake, my God, you don’t make a child suffer!"

"unfortunately, a great number of judges and social workers are rigidly unable to judge cases in a human way."

"I believe the family to be terribly important, even when it is obsessive or repressive or full of insidious germs which can pollute life. But it’s a necessary institution, a way in which children become adults, for which there’s no substitute."

"Every time I sit down to write a book I feel that I have to start from zero, that I have to re-learn how to write."

"(PB: You wrote your essay “The Little Virtues” a long time ago, really in another age. A number of American readers are very much taken with the piece while finding it a direct challenge to their familiar assumptions. Would you still offer parents the same advice with regard to the upbringing of their children or have your thoughts changed?) NG: I’m sure that I would write exactly the same thing; even in these difficult times one should only teach the big virtues, generosity more than anything else. The rest can be learned later on."

"A journalist recently said in the newspapers that writers should keep their mouths shut as much as possible and I think he was probably right. Better to write than to speak."

"what a job of ants and horses translation is. (PB: Ants and horses?) NG: One has to be as exact and industrious as an ant and have the impetus, the strength, of a horse to pull ahead."

"When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn't matter much to me. Only, I don't want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked 'a small writer like who?' it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life."

"What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken."

"Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin."

"He knew how to find time to study and to write, to earn his living and to wander idly through the streets he loved; whereas we, who staggered from laziness to frantic activity and back again, wasted our time trying to decide whether we were lazy or industrious"

"Our dreams are never realized and as soon as we see them betrayed we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by."

"if we ourselves have a vocation, if we have not betrayed it, if over the years we have continued to love it, to serve it passionately, we are able to keep all sense of ownership out of our love for our children. But if on the other hand we do not have a vocation, or if we have abandoned it or betrayed it out of cynicism or a fear of life, or because of mistaken parental love, or because of some little virtue that exists within us, then we cling to our children as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a tree trunk."

"(prompt: "The book that changed my life") I was well into my 30s when I read The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg and as soon as I began I felt myself deeply connected. It isn’t that it’s the greatest book in the world, but for me it was vital. I felt she was showing me the type of writer I had it in me to be. One of the essays – “My Vocation” – really hit the nail on the head. I identified profoundly with the way in which Ginzburg traced her own development as a nonfiction writer. It made me realise that it was only through this kind of writing I could employ my own storytelling gifts. I reread it irregularly but quite a lot, and I’m always amazed by what she is able to accomplish with the small personal essay."

"The novels and essays of Natalia Ginzburg (among them, The Manzoni Family and The Little Virtues) address both her Sephardic ancestry and her leftist political philosophy."

"The Siberian community in which I grew up came from a much older one that had already developed a system of self-control and was opposed to any form of power. It didn't just oppose socialism, but also the Tsar's regime and its slavery. [...] By the late 1980s, I already knew that the community was dying. When I started writing I realized that this tradition had helped them survive, but it couldn't save them."

"There is no [Siberian] community anymore. Just me, my brother, and maybe some others. The problem is that there is nothing left in Siberia either. The core of this community was deported to Transnistria and did not survive there."

"The only thing for certain about Russia is that it will always be immersed in chaos. That's normal. It's its historical state."

"There is not, nor will there ever be, a democratic government in Russia. Only a dictatorship can manage such a territory and all the populations that inhabit it."

"Actually, I now consider myself Italian in all respects. I have Italian citizenship, it would be wrong and incorrect to define myself as Russian, although I have recently received quite a few attacks from my former fellow Russian citizens."

"I'm fucking telling you, my friend ... All the fucking money is in the hands of the rich fucking Jews. I'm telling you, it's a fucking conspiracy. And did you know that the rich fucking Jews started the Second World War? I'm telling you for sure, those bitches didn't spare their own tribe, just to enrich themselves further! ... You've heard of this Bilderberg Club, right? Yeah, yeah, my friend explained everything about them really well. My friend, you know, Licio fucking Gelli, P2, know what I mean? ... When I arrived, I was a complete fool about this, but he opened my eyes."

"I'm apolitical. I only write about what I've seen and experienced, but someone who still dreams of black communism would prefer me dead. And if I had stayed in the country, I already would be. That's why I, my wife, and my four-year-old daughter sleep with a Kalashnikov next to our pillow. [...] The Carabinieri are very worried, and my family even more so. On Facebook they have written terrible things to me, some absurd (a guy who claims to have paid hitmen from the Russian mafia to eliminate me) others more credible."

"I've never studied Italian, I learned it through contact with people, reading children's books and watching cartoons. But now I can even tackle Dante."

"Not only have I never gone to school, but not even the Holden school, which keeps ignoring me anyway."

"I live a fairly peaceful life compared to many others, but I have the support of the army and the police. I walk around with my gun. And I have weapons at home. But it's not true, as has been written, that I sleep with a gun. I sleep with my daughter. However, I prefer not to delve into the matter further."

"Since I have always dealt with security, a private volunteer company linked to the Vatican infiltrated me into some Satanist groups for two years. I discovered a large pedophile ring there between Russia and Europe. I have reported on several people, but the problem is that they are thoroughly protected. [...] I can say that I uncovered the existence of a pedophile network in Munich. The report was never followed up. After all, a porn film with the participation of a minor, shot in a few copies, can cost from 50 to 70 thousand euros. I discovered some really disgusting things. [...] I hoped to continue working in this environment, but, after the publication of my two novels, my face is just too well-known. Plus, I now have a five-year-old daughter. However, I will never stop telling everyone that pedophiles are rich and powerful, and not just in Italy: in Belgium there are pro-pedophile associations that help them hide."

"My daughter's only five years old and she's already learned how to dissassemble and reassemble a gun: I taught her that because I think it could be a useful skill for her one day."

"I am appalled by how things are going with Putin, his homophobic laws, the censorship, pedophilia used as a criminal means of earning money. Western-style corruption has taken over, which is why Putin and Berlusconi are such friends, and even look like each other: both of them have undergone plastic surgery to look younger, but only Satan never ages. They are demons. [...] I no longer have the stomach to live in such a country, where the only way out left is suicide. [...] We need a new revolution, of ideas, not weapons."

"I say what I know and what I know is certain. I have been involved in five wars, on the front lines, even though I am only 34 years old. When you Western boys were still messing around with some girl in the back seat of a car, I was already killing terrorists in Chechnya."

"The history of the United States has been the history of a series of military interventions and aggressions, direct or indirect, real or fake wars. All to favor the private interests of private economic groups. A typical Anglo-Saxon style, moreover. They have not invented anything. They conquer territories, intervene in other people's affairs, only to grab money, allies, business."

"Imagine if this vast continent, from Europe to Russia, to Kazakhstan, to India, to China, could unite. Imagine what a boom Italy could have, we could sell our fashion, our products, our books. We can do without the Americans and they can't stand it. So they have begun brutal operations, the same ones that today, however, they are no longer able to manage. They are losing everywhere, even here."

"Development is here, Russia is growing and Europe has every interest in making a deal with them, freeing itself from the yoke of American private multinationals. I speak as an Italian citizen, as an Italian patriot. Our economy, the real one, does not need this system that is now bankrupt. It must free itself from the grip of America and Brussels."

"To avoid further deaths and douse the fire of this civil war, Ukraine must cease to exist as a State. The government, law enforcement and the army which have stained themselves with crimes against humanity must be arrested and tried for their responsibility. NATO should be dissolved immediately, seeing as the bloc of nations comprising the Warsaw Pact hasn't existed for more than two decades. What's needed is a military intervention by the UN to disarm both sides involved in this war. The criminal Nazis of Kiev, their Washington collaborators and advisors should be brought before the International Court of Justice in Hague and judged with all the severity that the law allows. Only this way and only from that point on will true and coherent news start arriving from that scarred nation: only then will the world be able to breathe freely."

"The [Second Chechen War] was caused by America's attempt to gain control of the Caspian Sea, this extraordinary energy reserve, a crucial geographic point for controlling all the former Soviet republics and Iran, where the viaducts transporting oil and gas run. To do so, they knew full well what the best tool was destabilizing Chechnya and Dagestan. The war in Chechnya began on the basis of this geopolitical premise: the United States' attempt to hold the Islamic Republic of Iran in check and seize Russia's historical territories. The forces in play at the time were the Russians, including the Chechens, and terrorists infiltrated by the CIA through a state that had sold itself to the Americans: Georgia."

"The first person I killed was a thirty-year-old gypsy who was dealing heroin in my neighborhood. I was fourteen, I tried to fight him and make him leave, but he beat me up. So I went to my grandfather and told him everything; he loaded a revolver, gave it to me and told me to shoot him in the knees. I shot him in the knees with the first shot but the second one went wrong and I hit his liver and he died. It was a war and my father did much worse. He was one of those who carried out reprisals, he suffered three very serious attacks, in one of them I was also in the car when they shot at us. A real war. Then my father had to leave the country because the war was lost. Corruption and the power of traffickers and drugs won. In fact he joined the police, politics, corrupt power and our country was occupied by these people. My mother, finding herself in this situation, married to a man who for years had opposed this system, had to flee because too often corrupt policemen came to search and threaten us, to know where my father was hiding, where his money was. I myself was taken into the woods several times, they pointed a gun at my head to try to get information. Then I also went away and had my experiences."

"Atheism is a religion. Declaring that you don't believe in anything is like saying you believe in something. In this way, they are a group, a cult."

"We are all brothers in that area and I wouldn't know how to shoot a Moldovan, because I love him: he's my brother."

"This snake [tattoo] on my arm is the demon I have to tame every day. My mentor forcibly tattooed it on me when I was 14. I had stabbed a boy in the back. He was paralyzed for life, but I was left with the demon tattooed with the needle, almost in relief, to hurt me more. A stain that reminds me of the biggest mistake of my life."

"What is a criminal? One who goes against justice? But what justice? Weren't the partisans and those who fought against communist regimes outlaws? For the Urkas, even Jesus was an honest criminal, they like it when the gospel says he came to bring the sword. He was a revolutionary."

"Russia encompasses one sixth of the Earth's surface. An act of castration has been put in place against the Olympics, because the Olympic Games without Russia will be a joke. What's more, they will be a slap in the face to democracy, pluralism and the unity of all the peoples who find themselves in the Olympic spirit. [...] This is a pretext to make Russia appear as a rogue state in front of the entire civilized world, reawakening the ghosts of the Cold War. It is a way to humiliate Russia and its citizens. Among other things, I still do not understand on what tangible evidence this nonsense is based. To me it seems like an agenda, the arguments seem weak and we have not yet seen incontrovertible proof."

"The champion of this club of oligarchs is Soros, who organizes revolutions and pushes global projects. In Italy we welcomed him with all honors, but perhaps it would have been better to treat him like the criminal he is. Here, people like him certainly have connections with the IOC and have all the tools to manipulate these people."

"There is no independent government in Italy. It is a country politically and militarily occupied by "terrorists" of the single currency, of single thought and of globalism."

"When I did military service in the sabotage squad and captured Islamic terrorists, we'd adopt a practice of preparation for interrogations which has always bothered me. [...] First of all we'd remove their trousers and underpants. Then we'd make a sort of gag with their socks which we'd stuff into their mouths. [...] I didn't get it at first. Then I asked our captain about it. [...] He explained that this practice had been studied by some psychologists, and that it served to deprive the prisoners of their own dignity, and therefore break them. So when we brought them before the interrogator, the terrorists would start talking immediately. It wasn't so hard to extract information from them at that point."

"The Soviet Union was unified through sacrifice and blood, millions of people died. My grandfather, even though he was anti-communist, always said that the greatest feat accomplished by the communists was to have united the Soviet Union and that we had to keep it united because it was our country. It was nice to be all together, to have one currency, one constitution, to be able to move freely..."

"If you read Wikipedia it seems that the Moldovans tried to re-annex Transnistria which in the meantime had proclaimed itself independent. It is half true. First of all, the Moldovans did not want to leave the Soviet Union. They left because some corrupt politicians, paid by Western oligarchs, destroyed the USSR. An army of mercenaries from all over the world arrived here: Hungarians, Germans, people from the Baltic countries. If the war lasted only two months it is precisely because the majority of the Moldovan people were against it and did not want to invade us. The greatest number of victims occurred during the first few days, when people were simply massacred while they tried to return home in fear. The first resistance, the most consistent, was popular. We kids rode the streets on bicycles and collected ammunition, we took weapons and other useful things from the dead. We followed the movements of military vehicles and reported them to the adults. It also happened that we fired Kalashnikovs in firefights. At that time the people in my building lived in my house because we had water from the well and several supplies of canned food. In the apartments there was no electricity, nor gas, they also cut off the water in the whole city because the mercenaries had tried to poison it. There were also several elderly people who needed medicine; in our courtyard we had a small refugee camp."

"I've killed quite a few people in Chechnya who had American passports."

"Mine was a criminal family. My grandfather robbed banks and my father armored vans. During the war my grandfather was a sniper, like almost all Siberian hunters; he was in the same convoy that took the great Vasily Zaytsev to Stalingrad. I'm often told that I had a bad childhood. Perhaps it's true, but I liked it that way. That element got me closer to the adults and I felt responsible."

"I am an internationalist and I want to break down borders. I do not understand why the Eurasian continent should not be united. This wall is wanted by those who consider Europe as a subject and consumer of their products, that is, the United States. If the League acts as a battering ram to break down this barrier, I am willing to vote for it. Once the wall is gone, I can stop and look at all the ethical issues. What else can I do?"

"It was like a concentration camp and I have bad memories because it was the first time I saw human beings lose everything, even dignity [...]. Thank God no one tried to hit me or put me down, there was no sexual violence towards me because our group stayed together, we made business with nobody and just tried to survive. I knew I never wanted to go back."

"In war, I had no time for understanding. It’s really fast and you think only of your mission. If you start to think about morality, you will die, because you lose control. You can’t think about life, you must think only of war so you will survive."

"One time, I found a kidnapped boy of 10 or 12, really dirty, really scared [...]. I preferred to see dead people. Alive was more terrible, because their condition was like dead. All those people who stayed a year or more in the terrorist camps had psychological troubles for the rest of their lives. He slept on my arm and our doctor told me to keep holding him, because he was nervous, he needed to feel my body to sleep. When I saw Salvatores' film, with the kidnapped boy, it was like reality for me. I told my manager, "he can make the film because he doesn’t care about money or public opinion [or even recreating] things in a perfect historical way, he cares about the true story inside the person"."

"I'm not pro-Russian, I'm Russian. I'm ethnically Russian. How the fuck can you call a Russian pro-Russian?"

"The West is the cradle of the fucking Anglo-Saxon colonialists, profiteers, bankers and warmongers. The world now no longer believes in the bullshit of Western democracy. The whole world is now against the West."

"Boris Nemtsov was shot to death because he was a womanizer. He was obsessed with pussy and was unlucky enough to have slept with the young and beautiful wife of a Georgian businessman strongly linked to Moscow's organized crime. Do the math and you'll see that blaming the secret services is just strange."

"Italian journalism and reporting [...] are all whores of the regime. I'm sorry but that's how it is. [...] when we talk about Italian newspapers, we are talking about scrap paper. Intellectual work in Italy no longer exists, coherence no longer exists. When you read something in the Italian press, it cannot be credible, period."

"I work with news, on my private Telegram channel; therefore, I have people who pay me to be informed. If people pay to have coherent news, it means that many citizens do not agree with what the Italian media reports and it is not surprising, because the Italian press keeps telling a lot of bullshit. The Russian press is always based on a propaganda line. We must not think that in Italy they are propagandists and in Russia they tell the whole truth. There is propaganda there too, but there is a difference: Russian journalists do not distance themselves from the objective truth, which is what Westerners have started to do quite some time ago."

"The majority of Russians are happy and actually want to support this policy more. When we talk about protests by Russians who do not want to go to war, it is all bullshit. Russians want to go to war and they want to defeat Nazism."

"Have you ever seen Russia waging colonial wars or wars to expand its territory? [...] The Russians do not want to invade anyone. The only reason they wage war is to ensure the security of their borders. That is why Putin has moved his army into Ukraine, because since 1998 NATO military activities have been taking place there that threaten Russia's borders. It is idiotic to say that Putin wants to invade Poland and the Baltics. Putin wants to take it easy, he does not want to have a gun pointed at his face by NATO."

"The war will not be short, it will be long, but Russia will be victorious for a simple reason: we are in the midst of a change in the world order. The West will no longer be able to extend its dominion and supremacy over a part of the world."

"The West has beauty, a great cultural heritage, and enormous potential, but it must free itself from Anglo-Saxon hegemony."

"My only commitment is to block any kind of support for the war. I have no other political interests. I have never been seriously interested in any kind of political program."

"My values ​​are left-wing, but not as the left is defined in Italy. I am not someone who fits into an ideology within the Italian system. I know well that in Italy some say that I am a fascist, because they quote some out-of-context phrase, or some old position of mine. But the truth is that I am the product of the Soviet system, for better or for worse."

"Despite the fact that he [Volodymyr Zelenskyy] is from a Jewish family, and that his grandfather served in the Soviet army, he supports Nazism for money, for economic reasons."

"It was ISIS in league with the Ukrainian Nazis. [...] But the order came from the CIA."

"That's the beauty of the Democratic Party: they support the Nazis in Ukraine, but they call me a fascist because I went to Casapound."

"When I was 12, Andriy Parubiy entered my town of Bender in Transnistria, leading some Nazi gangs who killed, among others, my uncle and my little cousin Tatiana."

"I don't wish any harm to anyone. I hope that these people [Stefania Battistini and Simone Traini] will live to a ripe old age. I hope that these people will also be able to reflect on the mistakes that have been made, but I know very well how it works in Russia, I know very well who the Russians are and how they act when they get angry. When they are hit, let's say, in their heart, they react quite harshly. And so, my sincere wish to these Italian journalists who have done this pro-Nazi propaganda work is to be very careful, be very careful. Don't accept tea from strangers. Be careful at the café. Be careful where you eat. Be careful with new friends, because it may be that the GRU operatives, who are the military secret services, are already working against you, and if they have really taken on a task, you can be sure that in a year, two years, three years, five years, in any case they will find you and tear you to pieces."

"Obviously [the Russo-Ukrainian war was] a gift to the Jewish lobbies and BlackRock. When they arrive, they lick their fingers when they see such a situation: Here you go! A new race and ethnicity has been invented. We can destroy Russian power, massacre Slavs and force them to kill each other thanks to an idea cooked up by the Poles and Hungarians even before the First World War and which was then spread widely by the communists. This is, in summary, the pain of Ukraine. They are Russians who reject the idea of being Russian, they've invented this thing about being Ukrainians, and obviously through this crazy, stupid idea they destroy themselves and their roots. It's obviously easier to control people this way. They've installed their Jewish boy to run this degraded land and he rightly doesn't want to end the war. How come? Because this is the essence of their plan: to massacre as many Ukrainians as possible in order to replace them with Jewish colonists from Israel and other parts of the world in order to create a new state there in Ukraine."

"He doesn't belong to a family of criminals, much less a Siberian one. His surname, for what it's worth, also sounds Polish. [...] When all's said and done, Lilin is just some guy who emigrated to a country where he had little chance of making an honest living, and he screwed it up big time by exploiting his exotic origins, inventing a larger-than-life character and passing it off as real. He is a literary impostor who plays on the thin line between imagination and reality. Life is never as romantic as we would like it to be, and this compels some to play a role they never had in the real world. Posing as a descendant of a criminal tribe and a Chechen War veteran is less risky than fighting in Chechnya and carrying out illegal activities. At most, people will think you're a liar."

"Un tappeto di boschi selvaggi [Lilin's autobiography] includes the reabilitatsiya, the rehabilitation certificate, of his great-grandfather (Nikolay Verzhbitsky). While writing the text of this photographic and autobiographical book, Lilin included the document and passed it off as a death sentence, as if there was nobody in Italy who knows a bit of Russian. It turns out his great-grandfather was born in Tiraspol, not in Siberia. [...] He was not a Siberian criminal deported to Moldova but, on the contrary, one of the many victims of Stalin's repressions, killed because he had a foreign surname and came from Moldova."

"He brings his fictional biography to life from beginning to end. And the more far-fetched it is, the more shocking moments it contains, the more fans he has. [...] All the facts of his biography have nothing to do with Siberia, Moldova or reality in general."

"He has never lived in Siberia and this whole criminal story about the Urka people in Siberian Education (Einaudi), who never existed, is fiction from beginning to end. Nicolai easily and even skillfully collects artistic facts that can actually be found in Russian and Soviet writers, for example, Dostoevsky, and which, over time, turn into stereotypes and prejudices about Russia and Siberia in the minds of readers. And on this basis it transforms them into presumed facts of modern, current reality. This is called an artistic hoax."

"If I called Lilin a "slasher", it's only because, having read his book which was marketed as an autobiography, I found scenes where he violently stabs his enemies. If it's not true, then the book isn't an autobiography. Tertium non datur. [...] He ought to act less touchy. In a democracy, which he clearly isn't used to, you accept counterarguments with civility."

"Siberian Education feels like a compendium of the dark fantasies that Westerners have about Transdniester as a place where people are left to fend for themselves or establish their own law. The reader is led to believe that the laws of the Siberian urkas are but one set of these surrogate forms of authority that exist in the black hole of Europe. It is a laughable portrayal."

"Lilin [has] forsaken his criminal upbringing in favor of a successful literary career in which he peddles Westerners their own deepest, darkest fears about Transdniester and Russia. Astutely aware of the region's outsized reputation, Lilin has found a literary niche, a captive audience uninterested in the facts."

"While framed as a memoir, Siberian Education deliberately embellishes the criminal elements of the PMR. As a storyteller, Lilin is the quintessential insider who confirms our darkest fears and fantasies. Born and raised in the PMR, he himself embodies its outlaw reputation and handsomely profits from it."

"As an author, Lilin places himself in the unimpeachable position of a trusted insider. Yet, upon closer inspection his biography and criminal history are more fictive than real. In online forums addressing the book's content and local reactions to it, locals and former acquaintances of Lilin intimate that, far from being a criminal, he actually served in the local militia before he emigrated. Locals' reactions to translated parts of his book range from disbelief and laughter to anger and outrage at the author's hollow attempts to besmirch his native city. Perhaps tellingly, some express astonishment that he was capable of pulling such a fast one on westerners."

"Although Lilin's book [Siberian Education] is about a Russian-speaking region and his native language is Russian, he writes in the language of his adopted native land, following in the tradition of Nabokov, Serge, and Triolet (nee Kagan). His choice to write in a non-native idiom firmly places his audience outside of the Russian-speaking world, yet the subjects of his two books – criminality in Transnistria and his experiences as a saboteur in Chechnya – emerge from distinctly Russian contexts. Perhaps most tellingly, both issues touch upon a perceived incommensurability between Russia and the West. It is somewhat ironic that Lilin's audience consists of the very same westerners who previously were the objects of his scorn. The enemy that he once hated, the West, now provides his bread and butter; the fact that there will soon be a film based on the book only adds to the absurdity."

"Somehow as a reader I find myself genuinely interested in the details of how someone with such a lengthy criminal record could serve multiple tours in Chechnya, immigrate to Ireland, move to Italy, learn Italian, and write a bestseller for a prominent Italian publishing house. Yet, his choice of subjects, his presentation of them, and his inability to acknowledge his critics leave the reader with even rudimentary knowledge of Transnistria wondering how one can so thoroughly drain the rich social fabric of the region of its content while simultaneously seeing criminal in anything and everything."

"Publishing has been plagued by fabricated memoirs in recent years. [...] But Nicolai Lilin's Free Fall: a Sniper's Story from Chechnya may be unique. Lilin, who wrote a brutal first-person account of fighting in the Russian army in the Chechen war, praised by its publisher as "a unique and remarkable memoir", has admitted that he did not experience much of what he described and deliberately embellished it to help sales."

"[...] it contains tales so unlikely that most editors would surely have spotted them as false, such as when Lilin finds a Chechen with a rifle loaded with hyper-accurate bullets filled with liquid mercury. Such an idea is nonsense since the liquid would shift in flight and render them useless."

"The foreword states that names, dates and places have been changed "to protect those involved" but gives no clue that the book is not a truthful account of someone's experiences. Almost a quarter of the book, pages 99-188, is an ultra-violent account of fighting in a built-up area – presumably Grozny – in which Lilin and his group rescued a cut off Russian unit, but not before it had lost 13 lieutenant-colonels."

"If Free Fall were a novel, it would be just a plot-free Russian version of Andy McNab. But, marketed as a memoir, Canongate can say that it "offers a unique perspective on one of the most controversial wars in living memory"."

"Judging by the many laudatory reviews of Nicolai Lilin's book in the European and American media, Western readers have no doubts about the veracity of the facts he presents. [...] The reviewers were not even bothered by the fact that Bender was called Tighina before 1940 and was part of Romania, and Stalin simply could not exile anyone there, especially since people back then were exiled to Siberia, not from it."

"If we summarize the information from Nicolai Lilin's book, his interviews in the Western press and speeches at book fairs, then by the age of 23 the author had managed to: serve two terms in a Transnistrian prison, be under investigation in Russia, serve three years as a sniper in Chechnya and a couple more years as a mercenary in Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. At 24, he got a job as a fisherman on a ship in Ireland, then moved to Italy, where he got married, opened a tattoo parlor, wrote a bestseller and almost became a victim of a politically motivated assassination attempt. Now Nikolai Lilin is 30 years old, he has his own fan club and he seriously discusses why Anthony Hopkins is not suitable for the lead role in the Hollywood film adaptation of his book."

"I asked Nicolai Lilin-Verzhbitsky what he thought about the comments of his former friends. He thinks that they envy him: "They feel offended and inferior. I managed to leave there and achieve something, but they did not". At the same time, in a conversation with me, unlike in interviews with Western journalists, he repeatedly emphasized that his book is not an autobiography and that his Western publishers are marketing it as such. And he, they say, has nothing to do with it."

"The author insists that the book [Free Fall] is based on his own combat experience in Chechnya. In an interview with Ogonyok, he said that he took part in the second Chechen campaign, but refused to give details. I learned from the Italian media that he allegedly served in the 56th Guards Airborne Assault Regiment. However, sources in the Ministry of Defense claim that there was no soldier named Lilin or Verzhbitsky in Chechnya."

"Nicolai Lilin has fled Italy because, he says, he was accused of being a spy for Putin. Considering all the bullshit he has spouted since arriving in Italy, probably none of this is true, except that he fled. If you are a spy, they don't take your passport away, they take you away. Who knows?"

"I met Lilin years ago after the publication of Siberian Education. He told me he was a friend of Licio Gelli and that he went around armed because he had many enemies. The book was very interesting, but it contained a series of obvious lies, both about the history of Russia and about his life. Half of my family is Russian and therefore I have direct sources, but I was amazed that everyone believed him. Shortly afterward, he wrote an article for L'Espresso, where he explained that he was a former sniper and that he had received offers from high-level mercenary groups to go and fight somewhere. It was such bullshit that I expected people to throw eggs at him. But no. The world of culture began to acclaim him as a hero, a thinker, a philosopher. Just look at those with whom he debated, who introduced him, who praised him. It was like living in a parallel world where those who loved him most were left-leaning. He took part in debates on democracy, on war, on the whole world, he had exhibitions of "Siberian" tattoos with institutional sponsorships. Every time I spoke about him I was accused of spreading shit about "someone more famous than you" or of having been fooled by Russian friends and relatives, who evidently had it in for someone who told the truth about the Putin regime."

"Over time his books began to sell less and he became a propagandist of the worst pro-Putin bullshit. I thought that everyone who had given him prestige and visibility would have done some self-criticism. Fat chance. People on the left who I knew very well decided to side with him because he was a "pacifist" and once again it seemed absurd to me, like an episode of Black Mirror. Just how was it possible for them to ally themselves with someone who published photomontages of the Ukrainian president snorting cocaine, in which he wrote that Navalny's wife was having fun with her lovers while he was dying, who insulted homosexuals hidden in the Ukrainian army? I don't know, I still can't wrap my head around it. Okay, the story is not over, given that today he made veiled threats to use polonium on journalists who speak badly of the Tsar. I just hope that, now that he is a fugitive, he doesn't become a martyr for free thought. And I also hope that those who previously praised him don't insult him now. Certain things have to be done when it's hard, not when it's convenient. But we're in Italy. Whoever talks the loudest always wins."

"Nicolai Lilin's words, in which he finds himself threatening our journalists with mafia-like methods and tones, are, to say the least, shameful. [...] But it is also shameful that this character has for years been invited to important television studios to talk about the Russian war in Ukraine, and that he has had ample space to pollute public discourse in our country."

"His works ("Free Fall: A Sniper’s Story" and "Siberian Education") are truly impressive for their triteness and the sheer quantity of outright lies, nevertheless, this man is a favorite among some Western readers in Europe and the United Kingdom."

"Needless to say, Lilin has never set foot in Chechnya or a Siberian prison, but, following in the footsteps of Baron Munchhausen, this does not stop him spouting a load of exorbitant cock-and-bull stories – and everyone, at least nearly everyone, laps them up!"

"Inside Russia people watch Nikolai Lilin’s ascent with surprise and admiration. [...] Wild and uncivilized as Russia may be, it is still highly unlikely that a book by a contemporary German writer about a squadron of former SS officers hiding in the forests outside Berlin, listening to Wagner with their children and grandchildren, reading aloud from the works of Junge and banging on tin drums as they rob passing trains, would ever be published here. [...] Everyone here would immediately see this drivel for what it is. But back in Europe, strange things can happen. Plenty of second-rate books make it to print, and the most popular still seem to be this load of nonsense that no one in his right mind would ever bother reading in Russia."

"If you would prefer Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs without their ingenious wit and structure, this may be a book for you."

"The narrative mode of the book is strange: sometimes, an anthropologist seems to be describing the traditions of a hitherto unknown Siberian ethnos who combine utterly ruthless criminality with the religious punctiliousness of the Exclusive Brethren, their traditions embodied in a Grandfather Kuzya who guides the juvenile hero and his friends on when, whom, how and with what weapon to maim and kill. At other times, author and reader wallow in a pornography of violence."

"If this "memoir" were believable, it might have some value (and serve as a pretext for invading Transnistria as a festering sore of criminality). But credulity collapses in the first pages, and not just because the chronology is a complete mess. The background to the "memoir" (in interviews on Italian television Lilin has begun to call Siberian Education an "autobiographical fairy-tale") is the deportation by Stalin in the 1930s of a group of intolerably active and anti-communist Siberian robbers westwards to Bendery on the Dnestr river, where they flourished in the 1990s. Usually, Stalin either shot such people, or sent them 1,000 miles closer to the North Pole: this would be Stalin's only recorded deportation from Siberia to Europe, all the more incredible because Bendery was from 1918 to 1940 in Romania."

"Translation rights to this book have been sold all over the world, but not in Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, or any language which the inhabitants of Bendery and Tiraspol might read. Lilin explains this as a precaution against revenge for revealing the secrets of the Siberian urka's language, tattoos and code. Doctoral theses and Internet archives, however, tell everything about the symbolism of Russian criminal tattoos, while the beliefs of Orthodox dissenters and of "thieves-in-the-law" have been described for over a century (but never before confounded as they are in this book, where revolvers used for killing are kept under icons)."

"Nicolai Lilin (if that is his real name) has obviously encountered the criminal world, but he makes gross errors – claiming that fenia, the criminal jargon originated by the ofenia, Russian travelling pedlars, is an aboriginal Siberian language."

"This book reads like a fantasist's ravings [...]. The success of Educazione siberiana implies that Italian publishing is floundering in the same cesspit as Italian television. One can only hope that British readers are not so gullible."

"Hailed as an insider's account of a cruel yet unknown world, Siberian Education was a literary sensation when first published in Italy in 2009. Lilin's raw and ungrammatical Italian has now been smoothed into readable English by Jonathan Hunt. The veracity of the story's basic elements has been fiercely defended by Lilin and accepted by many critics; yet many readers may feel they have landed in the Hayborian age invented by Robert Ervin Howard, among the likes of Conan the Barbarian and the Vanir warlords."

"The book [Siberian Education] is presented as a "shocking exposé of an extraordinary criminal underworld", although a strategically placed note (absent from the Italian edition) warns the reader that "certain episodes are imaginative recreation, and those [unspecified] episodes are not intended to portray actual events". During an interview on Italian television, Lilin repeatedly threatened a journalist who cast doubt on his story. At the risk of exposing myself to the wrath of the last descendant of the Siberian criminals, I venture to say that the urkas have never existed — at least not as described by the author."

"When confronted with glaring innaccuracies and contradictions, Lilin retorted that these charges are the equivalent of accusing Anne Frank of miscounting the number of electricity poles in Bergen-Belsen. I leave it to the reader to pass judgement on the aptness and sensitivity of the comparison."

"Lilin draws on the vast literature about the prison life and criminal underworld of Russia to create a sect whose putative "Siberian" origin is fantastical and whose traditions, practices and language are lifted from well-known Soviet and post-Soviet prison-based criminal fraternities [...]. Lilin's furious reactions to those who cast doubt on his criminal credentials can best be explained by the fact that some elements of the book do reflect his own experience while most of the rest is widely known in Russia to readers of quasi-fictional crime tales by Valery Karyshev and to viewers of the prison-based TV series Zona."

"Let's just say that the childhood he describes, in a context of poverty and marginalization, is credible. Just as it is likely that it led to the natural outcome of prison. Even a brief stint with youth gangs is possible. It's the part about the mafia that's unconvincing. [...] I have met members of the Russian mafia. Those who are killers certainly don't go around telling people about it."

"According to Lilin, the Urkas were an ethnic minority, "descendants of the ancient Efey", who lived by hunting and robbery and who were deported from Siberia to Transnistria in the 1930s, when it was part of Romania (it would be annexed to the USSR in 1940, in the partition of Europe between Stalin and Hitler). Thus the communists would have populated the "Romanian empire", as the writer calls it, with Russian criminals, defeating the local gangs. "Absurd", laughs Pavel Polian, a Russian historian who has been studying the deportations of communism and Nazism for 25 years: "They were deported to Siberia, but not from Siberia, much less to Moldova. And the Efey never existed"."

"According to Lilin, the very existence of the Urkas was a state secret. An almost extinct community, which had left a deep mark, single-handedly winning the war of 1992, when Moldova, in the grip of hot post-Soviet spirits, invaded the breakaway province. In Siberian Education, it is narrated how the "Siberians" triumphed by blowing up one of the two cinemas in Bender full of soldiers. Marian Bozhesku, Ukrainian researcher and author of Transnistria 1989-1992, the most exhaustive study on the conflict, says he has never heard of this. "For us the memory of the war is still very much alive, we fought desperately. To say that criminals won it is ridiculous", says indignant Denis Poronok, who is the same age as Lilin, 31, and disputes "Nicolai's version": "The blown up cinema is a fairy tale, and there were four theaters, not two in Bender in 1992"."

"Bender is a small town of 80 thousand inhabitants where everyone knows each other. They also know Nicolai (even though he had a different surname at the time), they remember his parents and his grandfather Boris, "a great person, he worked until the end", says a contemporary of the writer. They met when they were in their twenties and he even went to his house: "There were no icons, no weapons, no 'Siberian' objects. He was curious, he read a lot". Anything criminal? "Never heard of him being in prison. In fact, it was said that at some point he had joined the police"."