A Quote by Italo Calvino
Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.
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Politics is about who wins and loses. The rest is of marginal interest.
The Indians are a marginal people in Guatemala just like I am a marginal person in the first world.
The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head--no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.
Literature is higher than politics, if not actually above politics.
Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.
The power of story is potent and that's why historical fiction can be an extraordinarily significant way of teaching people logical truth propositions, moves you along, moves your emotions as well as informs your intellect.
The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.
I do lots of reading and speaking at many universities about literature and also about politics, which is as much a part of my life as the literature.
The contradiction [trying to use Russian model to reshape Italy] grew to such an extent that I felt totally cut off from the communist world and, in the end, from politics. That was fortunate. The idea of putting literature in second place, after politics, is an enormous mistake, because politics almost never achieves its ideals.
The road to hell is paved with the pursuit of volume. Volume leads to marginal products, marginal customers, and greatly increased managerial complexity.
Capricornia is one of the most marginal seats in the country. So naturally the electoral battle is fought in the marginal seats.
I feel we have to begin standing our ground in the places we love. I think that we have to demand that concern for the land, concern for the Earth, and this extension of community that we've been speaking of, is not marginal - in the same way that women's rights are not marginal, in the same way that rights for children are not marginal. There is no separation between the health of human beings and the health of the land. It is all part of a compassionate view of the world.
I see no reason in morality, why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. It is one of the effects, perhaps one of the functions of literature to arouse desire, and I can discover no grounds for saying that sexual pleasure should not be among the objects of desire which literature presents to us, along with heroism, virtue, peace, death, food, wisdom, God, etc.
The ultimate goal of radical politics is gradually to displace the limit of social exclusions, empowering the excluded agents (sexual and ethnic minorities) by creating marginal spaces in which they can articulate and question their identity. Radical politics thus becomes an endless mocking parody and provocation, a gradual process of reidentification in which there are not final victories and ultimate demarcations
If people want go-along, get-along politics, I am not their guy.
Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.
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