"Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time e...
Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.
~ Italo Calvino ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.
More Italo Calvino quotes
"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight f...
"The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give th...
"Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the...
"Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell th...
"Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make co...
"Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely pr...
"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has b...
"Reading is solitude.
"What is more natural than that a solidity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book? You can leave the...
"Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven't Read- Books You Needn't Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open...
"If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every ex...
"I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no intere...
"I am the man who comes and goes between the bar and the telephone booth. Or, rather:that man is called 'I' and you know nothing else about him, just a...