On Lightness of Literature

After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work. I would suggest this: my working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. i have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities, above all i have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language. 

                                   ---Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium