Italo Calvino's '5 Imaginative Qualities for the New Millenium'

• Lightness

• Quickness

• Multiplicity

• Exactitude

• Visibility

In Calvino's "Six Memos for the Next Millenium" he wrote, "In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought."

Calvino was to deliver these "memos" (there were to be six) as Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86 but he died after completing the fifth.

[via Sarah Ruhl, in John Lahr's March 17, 2008 New Yorker profile of her]