"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...
Reading is solitude.
More Italo Calvino quotes
"Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.
"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...
"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...
"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 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...
"Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ......
"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and thr...
"Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
"Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.
"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me...