Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) was an Italian playwright, novelist, and short-story writer who usually portrayed Italian middle-class society. Pirandello combined relativistic assessment with a particular Pirandellian style of humor (“Pirandellismo,”) and explored the struggle between essence and appearance.
Pirandello is best remembered for three surrealistic plays that question the nature of truth: Six Characters in Search of an Author (1922,) Henry IV (1922,) and Right You Are (If You Think You Are) (1927.)
By the time Pirandello received the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature, he had also written poetry, essays, and novels as well as several hundred short stories. His notable novels include The Outcast (1901) and The Late Mattia Pascal (1904.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Luigi Pirandello
Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.
—Luigi Pirandello
Life is little more than a loan shark: It exacts a high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Life
Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have … the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality … which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Realization, Acceptance, Awareness
Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Dignity
In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Dreams
You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Reality
The secret of living is to find a pivot, the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Dedication, Commitment, Happiness
It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Discontent
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!
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Literature, Books
My opinion is a view I hold until … well, until I find something that changes it.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Change, Opinion
None of us can estimate what we do when we do it from instinct.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Instincts
Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Life and Living, Aspirations, Aptness, Appropriateness, Goals
Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Nature
Woman—for example, look at her case! She turns tantalizing inviting glances on you. You seize her. No sooner does she feel herself in your grasp than she closes her eyes. It is a sign of her mission, the sign by which she says to man: “Blind yourself, for I am blind.”
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Women, Love
I present myself to you in a form suitable to the relationship I wish to achieve with you.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Relationships
Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be—like the reality of yesterday—an illusion tomorrow.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Reality
Life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, because they are true.
—Luigi Pirandello
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.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
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.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
A fact is like a sack—it won’t stand up if it’s empty. To make it stand up, first you have to put in it all the reasons and feelings that caused it in the first place.
—Luigi Pirandello
Topics: Facts
Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.
—Luigi Pirandello
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