"Don't you ever get tired of reading? she asked. You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation? she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that moment would have paid anything rather than give up his novel, it seemed downright threatening."
Italo Calvino was an Italian novelist and short-story writer whose experimental and imaginative fiction made him one of the most influential postwar European authors. Born in 1923, he wrote major works including Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler. He died in Siena on 1985-09-19.