How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed that uncomfortable partition which is my person! Style, taste, individual philosophy, subjectivity, cultural background, real experience, psychology, talent, tricks of the trade: all the elements that make what I write recognizable as mine seem to me a cage that restricts my possibilities. If I were only a hand, a severed hand that grasps a pen and writes...who would move this hand? The anonymous throng? The spirit of the times? The collective unconscious? I do not know.

Viewing civilian life as a continuation of the partisan struggle he confirmed his membership of the Italian Communist Party. In 1947 he graduated with a Master's thesis on Joseph Conrad wrote short stories in his spare time and landed a job in the publicity department at the Einaudi publishing house run by Giulio Einaudi. Austere anti-Fascist freethinkers Eva and Mario refused to give their sons any religious education.

Italo Calvino (Italian: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]; 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. Lionised in Britain and the United States he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.