Italo Calvino Quotes

We'll make an army in the trees and bring the earth and the people on it to their senses.

I've been in love for five hundred million years ...

I detest this contemporary trend to destroy the traditional hierarchy of genres.

Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt.

At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it.

Readers are my vampires.

An invisible landscape conditions the visible one

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

I felt cheated and I decided to demand justice of the sultan.

The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.

I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!

Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

I read, therefore it writes

It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse.

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.

I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.

The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, I read, therefore it writes.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.

Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Contemporaries cannot be good judges.

Forgive me if I have a kind of allergic reaction to all words that hint of nationalism ...

New York is a fabled city, a fabulous city.

I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

Desires are already memories.

If this is what you believe, you are wrong: Penthesilea

I suffer from everyday life.

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!

Decide for yourself. Everybody reacts in a different way.

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.

The fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's.

If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," "Today it is windy"?

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.

...
KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.

POLO: And here, in fact, we are.

In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins.

The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours.

A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

Eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.

One reads alone, even in another's presence.

There is still, in fact, in Calvino's archive a drawer full of newspaper cuttings concerning scientific discoveries. As

I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.

I'm terrified of writing at night, for then I can't sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and go on into the late afternoon.

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find.

Again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

wrong: Penthesilea is

Only by having a clear idea what virtue is can I practice evil with a light heart.

I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.

... we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing

We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.

Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.

The cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.

The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.

Folktales are real.

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year.

My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.

In museums I always enjoy stopping at the Saint Jeromes.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.