Italo Calvino quotes

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. (Italo Calvino)
The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible. View quote
Italo Calvino
It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books. View quote
Italo Calvino
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. View quote
Italo Calvino
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. View quote
Italo Calvino
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner. View quote
Italo Calvino
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. View quote
Italo Calvino
There is no language without deceit. View quote
Italo Calvino
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision. View quote
Italo Calvino
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do. View quote
Italo Calvino
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language. (Italo Calvino)
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness. View quote
Italo Calvino
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be. View quote
Italo Calvino
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary. View quote
Italo Calvino
Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story. View quote
Italo Calvino
Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough. View quote
Italo Calvino
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. View quote
Italo Calvino
One reads alone, even in another's presence. View quote
Italo Calvino
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. View quote
Italo Calvino
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. View quote
Italo Calvino
They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now. (Italo Calvino)
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? View quote
Italo Calvino
In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman. View quote
Italo Calvino
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. View quote
Italo Calvino
Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have. View quote
Italo Calvino