I Would Like to be Mercutio …

I would like to be Mercutio. Among his virtues, I admire above all his lightness, in a world full of brutality, his dreaming imagination – as the poet of Queen Mab – and at the same time his wisdom, as the voice of reason amid the fanatical hatreds of Capulets and Montagues. He sticks to the old code of chivalry at the price of his life perhaps just for the sake of style and yet he is a modern man, sceptical and ironic: a Don Quixote who knows very well what dreams are and what reality is, and he lives both with open eyes.

[The New York Times Book Review, 89:49 (2 December 1984) asked a certain number of celebrities what character from a novel or from a work of non-fiction they would like to be. This was Calvino’s reply (in English).]