Il libro nero

'Il libro nero. Nuovo diario di Gog' (lit. 'The Black Book: Gog's New Diary') is a 1951 novel by the Italian writer Giovanni Papini. It is in the form of a diary with the views and adventures of the American millionaire Goggins, nicknamed Gog. It is the sequel to Papini's 1931 novel Gog. It was awarded the Premio Marzotto.

Picasso quotation
The book contains fictitious interviews with famous people including Adolf Hitler, Guglielmo Marconi, Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. A self-critical comment from the book's version of Picasso was quoted by several publications as genuine. In this comment, Picasso says: "When I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt and Goya were great painters; I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and has exhausted as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere." Life, having published the quotation as genuine, published a correction in 1969 where it attributed it to Il libro nero and wrote that it reflects Papini's view of contemporaneous culture rather than Picasso's.