Top 100 Calvino Quotes
#1. I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!
Italo Calvino
#2. He[ Italo Calvino] always said it would be impossible to try to make films out of his books, though he hoped it would happen because that's where the money was.
Giovanna Cau
#3. The best novelist of my generation is an Italian living in Paris, still working and improving - Italo Calvino.
Gore Vidal
#4. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Italo Calvino
#5. 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
#6. All over the world great writers were dying young: Italo Calvino, Raymond Carver, and now here was Angela wrestling with the Reaper. A fatwa was not the only way to die. There were older types of death sentence that still worked very well.
Salman Rushdie
#7. There is still, in fact, in Calvino's archive a drawer full of newspaper cuttings concerning scientific discoveries. As
Italo Calvino
#8. Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young. - Italo Calvino
Kevin Brockmeier
#9. We [ with Italo Calvino] had a great relationship. I don't think it's a coincidence that his only daughter's name is Giovanna. I loved his book dedications to me: "To Giovanna Cau, another book that won't be turned into a movie."
Giovanna Cau
#10. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO
Salman Rushdie
#11. Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
Italo Calvino
#12. The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.
Italo Calvino
#13. Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find.
Italo Calvino
#14. The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. In
Italo Calvino
#15. If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.
Italo Calvino
#16. Sometimes I try to concentrate on the story I would like to write, and I realize that what interests me is something else entirely, or, rather, not anything precise but everything that does not fit in what I ought to write.
Italo Calvino
#17. 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
#18. I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.
Italo Calvino
#19. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
#20. The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.
Italo Calvino
#21. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity.
Italo Calvino
#22. Again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.
Italo Calvino
#23. Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.
Italo Calvino
#25. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
Italo Calvino
#26. With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig.
Italo Calvino
#27. I will quote Cioran (who is not yet a classic but will become one): "While they were preparing the hemlock, Socrates was learning a tune on the flute. 'What good will it do you,' they asked, 'to know this tune before you die?
Italo Calvino
#28. 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
#29. At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
#30. Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.
Italo Calvino
#31. If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.
Italo Calvino
#32. That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter.
Italo Calvino
#33. The novels I prefer, are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page.
Italo Calvino
#34. 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
#35. As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known
Italo Calvino
#36. I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.
Italo Calvino
#37. His life was dominating by conflicting ideas, as often happens in periods of transition. The turbulence of the times makes some people feel a need to bestir themselves, but in the opposite direction, backwards rather than forwards;
Italo Calvino
#38. A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
Italo Calvino
#39. Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
Italo Calvino
#40. Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search ... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.
Italo Calvino
#41. ...
KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.
POLO: And here, in fact, we are.
Italo Calvino
#43. 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
#45. I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.
Italo Calvino
#46. The lawn mower attends with defeaning shudder to the tonsure; a light odor of fresh hay intoxicates the air; the leveled grass finds again a bristling infancy; but the bite of the blades reveals unevenness, mangy clearings, yellow patches.
Italo Calvino
#48. My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never ... occupy a place in contemporary literature.
Italo Calvino
#49. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.
Italo Calvino
#50. 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
#51. My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
Italo Calvino
#52. Does the written word tame passions? Or subdue the forces of nature? Or does it find a harmony with the inhumanity of the universe? Or incubate a violence, held back but always ready to spring, to claw?
Italo Calvino
#53. Where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third,
Italo Calvino
#54. I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.
Italo Calvino
#55. Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.
Italo Calvino
#56. In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.
Italo Calvino
#57. The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.
Italo Calvino
#58. When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
Italo Calvino
#59. No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.
Italo Calvino
#60. 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
#61. It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ...
Italo Calvino
#62. 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
#64. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Italo Calvino
#65. Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond ...
Italo Calvino
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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.
Italo Calvino
#69. 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
#70. The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.
Italo Calvino
#71. Cosimo stretched out his arms. 'I came up here before you, my lords, and here I will stay afterwards too!'
-'You want to withdraw!' cried El Conde.
-'No, to resist,' replied the Baron.
Italo Calvino
#72. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
#73. 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
#74. And Polo answers, Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities ...
Italo Calvino
#75. 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
#76. Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.
Italo Calvino
#77. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living.
Italo Calvino
#78. Fantasy is like jam ... You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing ... out of which you can't make anything.
Italo Calvino
#79. 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
#80. Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
Italo Calvino
#81. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms.
Italo Calvino
#82. All places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.
Italo Calvino
#83. 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
#84. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.
Italo Calvino
#85. The fact is that I find in the day's light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night's.
Italo Calvino
#86. The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours.
Italo Calvino
#87. 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
#88. For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
Italo Calvino
#89. If the spark doesn't come, that's a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.
Italo Calvino
#90. Only by having a clear idea what virtue is can I practice evil with a light heart.
Italo Calvino
#91. 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
#92. There is little I can tell you about Aglaura beyond the things its own inhabitants have always repeated: an array of proverbial virtues, of equally proverbial faults, a few eccentricities, some punctilious regard for rules.
Italo Calvino
#93. Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
Italo Calvino
#94. Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Italo Calvino
#95. Forgive me if I have a kind of allergic reaction to all words that hint of nationalism ...
Italo Calvino
#96. Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
Italo Calvino
#97. 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
#98. 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
#100. I thought: "Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead." And I also thought: "This means the beyond is not happy.
Italo Calvino
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