on being many things

The artist's imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realizing. What we experience by living is another world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that accumulate on the page, like the layers of colors on the canvas, are yet another world, also infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation. The link between the three worlds is the indefinable spoken of by Balzac: or, rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes.

- Italo Calvino, "Visibility" pp. 97, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Medieval literature tended to produce works expressing the sum of human knowledge in an order and form of stable compactness, as in the Commedia, where a multiform richness of language converges with the application of systematic and unitary mode of thought. In contrast, the modern books that we love most are the outcome of a confluence and clash of a multiplicity of interpretative methods, modes of thought, and styles of expression. Even if the overall design has been minutely planned, what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it-- a plurality of languages as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.

- Italo Calvino, "Multiplicity" pp. 116-117, Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only too enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic....

- Italo Calvino, "Multiplicity" pp. 124, Six Memos for the Next Millennium