However wide-ranging any person's formative reading may be, there will always be an enormous number of fundamental works that one has not read.- Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?*
Once, during work on Calvino's great comic novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, a running battle ensued over use of the word 'feedback', which Weaver repeatedly struck out of the typescript, and Calvino repeatedly re-inserted. (In the end, Weaver won: Calvino died before he was able to see the final proofs.)- Ian Thompson, in his Guardian obit of the legendary William Weaver
