Top 100 Italo Calvino Quotes
#1. Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find.
Italo Calvino
#2. I think today that politics registers very late things which society manifests through other channels, and I feel that often politics distorts and mystifies reality.
Italo Calvino
#3. Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the "I," the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world.
Italo Calvino
#4. The Sultan's wife must never remain without books that please her: a clause in the marriage contract is involved, a condition the bride imposed on her august suitor before agreeing to the wedding ...
Italo Calvino
#5. I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.
Italo Calvino
#6. Polo: "You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours."
Khan: "Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.
Italo Calvino
#8. I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.
Italo Calvino
#9. In the Ondariva gardens the branches spread out like the tentacles of extraordinary animals, and the plants on the ground opened up stars of fretted leaves like the green skins of reptiles, and waved feathery yellow bamboos with a rustle like paper.
Italo Calvino
#10. Where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third,
Italo Calvino
#11. Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
Italo Calvino
#12. 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 the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Italo Calvino
#13. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Italo Calvino
#14. Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in that kaleidescope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces.
Italo Calvino
#15. To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
Italo Calvino
#16. Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.
Italo Calvino
#17. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
#18. A model is by definition that in which nothing has to be changed, that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces; so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.
Italo Calvino
#19. I'm accustomed to thinking of literature as a search for knowledge; in order to move onto existential terrain I need to consider it in relation to anthropology, ethnology, and mythology.
Italo Calvino
#20. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.
Italo Calvino
#21. Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
Italo Calvino
#22. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino
#23. In 'Cosmicomics,' I came close to science fiction - I was inspired by cosmological subjects and the workings of the universe and invented a character who was a sort of witness to everything that was happening inside the solar system.
Italo Calvino
#24. Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Italo Calvino
#25. The more time passed, the less happened. The more they felt something must happen, the more the bailiffs realized they had to do something but the less they understood what it was.
Italo Calvino
#26. Night fell, the first I had spent not embracing a rock, and perhaps for this reason it seemed cruelly shorter to me. The light tended at every moment to erase Ayl, to cast a doubt on her presence, but the darkness restored my certainty she was there.
Italo Calvino
#27. Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.
Italo Calvino
#28. The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
Italo Calvino
#29. Who are we, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way.
Italo Calvino
#30. For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book.
Italo Calvino
#31. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust.
Italo Calvino
#32. I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.
Italo Calvino
#33. Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.
Italo Calvino
#34. My university work was not central to my education.
Italo Calvino
#35. What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
Italo Calvino
#36. Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
#37. This thought has always filled me with terror: that I might be one of those people, that I might be only one of those people.
Italo Calvino
#38. These are people used to seeing one another daily year after year; everything they say is the continuation of things already said.
Italo Calvino
#39. A child's pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme.
Italo Calvino
#40. The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.
Italo Calvino
#41. Yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone.
Italo Calvino
#42. But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.
Italo Calvino
#43. There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader's book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing.
Italo Calvino
#44. I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.
Italo Calvino
#45. Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
Italo Calvino
#46. The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
#47. You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?
Italo Calvino
#48. 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 been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification.
Italo Calvino
#49. When you've waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred;
Italo Calvino
#50. Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
#51. A gentleman, my Lord Father, is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops
Italo Calvino
#52. Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.
Italo Calvino
#53. I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
#54. It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
Italo Calvino
#56. Although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.
Italo Calvino
#57. In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travelers overtaken by night on their journey: lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble wayfarers.
Italo Calvino
#58. Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.
Italo Calvino
#60. I think up to a point people's characters depend on the toilets they have to shut themselves up in every day. You get home from the office and you find the toilet green with mould, marshy: so you smash a plate of peas in the passage and you shut yourself in your room and scream.
Italo Calvino
#61. To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, a
world of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed down
below, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejection your present state, there is no knowing where you can arrive.
Italo Calvino
#62. Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
Italo Calvino
#65. To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means ... I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it.
Italo Calvino
#66. If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects, I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things.
Italo Calvino
#67. Now she is inviting you to a seminar at the university, where books are analyzed according to all Codes, Conscious and Unconscious, and in which all Taboos are eliminated, the ones imposed by the dominant Sex, Class, and Culture.
Italo Calvino
#68. To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful.
Italo Calvino
#69. The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
Italo Calvino
#70. From this arid sphere every discourse and every poem sets forth; and every journey
through forests, battles, treasures, banquets, bedchambers, brings us back here, to the center
of an empty horizon.
Italo Calvino
#71. The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.
Italo Calvino
#72. It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse.
Italo Calvino
#73. 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.
Italo Calvino
#74. Are you depressed or euphoric? The house, in its wisdom, seems to have taken advantage of your moments of euphoria to prepare itself to shelter you in your moments of depression.
Italo Calvino
#75. 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
Italo Calvino
#76. Long-time inhabitant of steeples, accustomed to contemplating, from his perch on a rainspout, the expanse of roofs, he knew that the souls of cities are more substantial and more lasting than those of all their inhabitants put together.
Italo Calvino
#78. ... we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Italo Calvino
#79. I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.
Italo Calvino
#80. Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.
Italo Calvino
#81. Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times.
Italo Calvino
#82. Most of the books I have written and those I intend to write originate from the thought that it will be impossible for me to write a book of that kind: when I have convinced myself that such a book is completely beyond my capacities of temperament or skill, I sit down and start writing it.
Italo Calvino
#83. In the morning you wake from one bad dream and another begins.
Italo Calvino
#84. What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
Italo Calvino
#85. Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
#86. in his view, literature's worth lies in its power of mystification, in mystification it has its truth; therefore a fake, as the mystification of a mystification, is tantamount to a truth squared. He
Italo Calvino
#87. You explode, if that's more to your taste, shoot yourself all around in endless darts, be prodigal, spendthrift, reckless: I shall implode, collapse inside the abyss of myself, towards my buried centre, infinitely.
Italo Calvino
#88. I felt cheated and I decided to demand justice of the sultan.
Italo Calvino
#89. I've been in love for five hundred million years ...
Italo Calvino
#91. Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.
Italo Calvino
#92. In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
Italo Calvino
#93. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
Italo Calvino
#94. Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
Italo Calvino
#95. Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot, they don't take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their own games, one more serious than the other, one game inside another, so that it's impossible to discover what the real one is.
Italo Calvino
#96. Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
Italo Calvino
#97. Politics is marginal, but literature moves along by indirection.
Italo Calvino
#98. We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?
Italo Calvino
#99. An invisible landscape conditions the visible one
Italo Calvino
#100. If this is what you believe, you are wrong: Penthesilea
Italo Calvino
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