Literary Birthday – 28 June – Luigi Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was born on 28 June 1867 and died on 10 December 1936.

Luigi Pirandello Quotes

1. One cannot choose what he writes – one can only choose to face it.
2. Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die! (Six Characters in Search of an Author)
3. Life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true. (Six Characters in Search of an Author)
4. When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him. (Six Characters in Search of an Author)
5. Don’t you see that that blessed conscience of yours is nothing but other people inside you? (Each in His Own Way)
6. When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him. (Six Characters in Search of an Author)
7. Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won’t work out. (The Pleasure of Honesty)
8. We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if the words I use have the sense and the value that I expect them to have, but whoever is listening to me inevitably thinks that those same words have a different sense and value, because of the private world he has inside himself, too. (Three Plays)
9. I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I’d love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true. (Pirandello’s Love Letters to Marta Abba)

Luigi Pirandello was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was the winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art”. With his invention of the ‘theatre within the theatre’ in the play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (1921; Six Characters in Search of an Author), he became an important figure in modern drama. His plays explored the absurdity of life, the ambiguous relationship between fact and fiction, and the relativity of truth. His tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd. Pirandello wrote over 100 short stories, about 40 plays, and seven novels.

Source for photograph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Luigi_Pirandello_1932.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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