Italo Calvino Quotes

It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image y...

Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.

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

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

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

Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid...

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only...

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places e...

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have ...

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information ab...

Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exerc...

I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is call...

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say...

From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the e...

Why d’you make me suffer?"“Because I love you.”Now it was his turn to get angry. “No, no, you don’t ...

Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away ...

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is t...

I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from...

The seventh reader interrupts you: "Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end...

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she k...

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we ...

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

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

But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that book exists that I will ...

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is de...

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

With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get ...

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except margina...

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Follo...

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

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a...

Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my ...

Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven't Read- Books You Needn't Read- Books Made for Purposes O...

If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said some...

What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader...

Reading is solitude.

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth th...

...the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great ...

Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you...

...Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make...

You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you a...

When you're young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time yo...

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

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

Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, histor...

If I love order, it's not the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of ...

If one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the...

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the nig...

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than ...

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it sho...

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

I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that a...

As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven...

I think that my first impulse arises from a hypersensitivity or allergy. It seems to me that languag...

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of ...

although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, ...

For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is k...

In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of ...

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remain...

I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existentia...

The real protagonist of the story, however, is the magic ring, because it is the movements of the ri...

I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.

what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force ...

The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or...

That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working ...

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty...

If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now, Mr. Palomar thinks, they would have thought...

A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "H...

To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, aworld of branches suspe...

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but...

The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, ...

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a pa...

In the streets of Cecilia, an illustrious city, I met once a goatherd, driving a tinkling flock alon...

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only ...

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other su...

Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order a...

Journeys to relive your past?' was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also ha...

How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and st...

I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every r...

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

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phra...

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

...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still ha...

Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those c...

It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his ...

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

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the r...

As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Ohcorpse, I have come rushing here only to be drag...

Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture.

The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax....

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

Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes.

Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can st...

To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the ...

…Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in th...

Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end...