Italo Svevo Quotes

Il vino è un grande pericolo specie perché non porta a galla la verità. Tutt'altro che la verità anzi: rivela dell'individuo specialmente la storia passata e dimenticata e non la sua attuale volontà; getta capricciosamente alla luce anche tutte le ideucce con le quali in epoca più o meno recente ci si baloccò e che si è dimenticate.

Quando si muore si ha ben altro da fare che di pensare alla morte.

Healthy love is the love that embraces a single, whole woman, including her character and her intelligence.

You might with advantage take out your map of modern literature and mark on it the name of Italo Svevo…for Svevo and his novel, Confessions of Zeno…will henceforth be on other people's maps, and it is well that the atlases of the enlightened should agree.

In the mind of a young man from a middle-class family, the concept of human life is associated with that of a career, and in early youth the career is that of Napoleon I.

Life is neither ugly nor beautiful, but it's original!

Thus, after pursuing those images, I overtook them. Now I know that I invented them. But inventing is a creation, not a lie.

Era dispostissimo ad istruirmi, ed anzi annotò di propria mano nel mio libretto tre comandamenti ch'egli riteneva bastassero per far prosperare qualunque ditta: 1. Non occorre saper lavorare, ma chi non sa far lavorare gli altri perisce. 2. Non c'è che un solo grande rimorso, quello di non aver saputo fare il proprio interesse. 3. In affari la teoria è utilissima, ma è adoperabile solo quando l'affare è stato liquidato.

Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free space. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain…in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of space?

The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno.

Wine is a great danger, especially because it doesn't bring truth to the surface. Anything but the truth, indeed: it reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more or less recent period one has toyed and then forgotten.

Disease is a conviction, and I was born with that conviction.

Zeno is one of the comic masterpieces of the century; as Svevo had previously used Flaubert more intelligently than any Italian before him, here he uses Freud in a way that no Italian has done since.

A novelist who ranks with Proust, Kafka, Musil and his friend James Joyce as one of the enduring pillars of Modernism.

When a man dies, he has too many other worries to allow any thinking about death.