Top 100 Calvino's Quotes
#1. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Italo Calvino
#2. 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
#3. There is still, in fact, in Calvino's archive a drawer full of newspaper cuttings concerning scientific discoveries. As
Italo Calvino
#4. I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!
Italo Calvino
#5. 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
#6. No one, wise Kublai, knows better than you that the city must never be confused with the words that describe it.
Italo Calvino
#7. 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
#8. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms.
Italo Calvino
#9. 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
#10. The only truth I can write is that of the instant I am living.
Italo Calvino
#11. Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end.
Italo Calvino
#12. 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
#13. And Polo answers, Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities ...
Italo Calvino
#14. 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
#15. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Italo Calvino
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
Italo Calvino
#29. He was staring hard, not at his wife and me but at his daughter watching us. In his cold pupil, in the firm twist of his lips, was reflected Madame Miyagi's orgasm reflected in her daughter's gaze.
Italo Calvino
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voi, a second person plural, you are two tu's, more separate and circumscribed than before.
Italo Calvino
#35. Only in a superficial sense can lies be said to exclude the truth; you will be aware that in many cases lies- the patient's lies to the psychoanalyst- are just as revealing as the truth, if not more so ...
Italo Calvino
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.
Italo Calvino
#39. Lucretius wants to write the poem of matter, but he warns us from the start that the reality of matter is that it's made of invisible particles. He
Italo Calvino
#40. Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Italo Calvino
#41. Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
Italo Calvino
#42. ...passions, poetry and the ego have been seen as perpetual explosions? But if that's true, then so its its opposite; ever since that August when athe mushroom rose over cities reduced to a layer of ash, an age was born in which the explosion is symbolic only of absolute negation.
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. Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.
Italo Calvino
#45. It's not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything.
Italo Calvino
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. An archer, the moment he thinks he's experienced, is lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is different from every other lion; woe to us if we stop to make comparisons, to deduce our movements from norms and premises.
Italo Calvino
#50. My sister always says she loves novels where you feel an elemental strength, primordial, telluric. That's exactly what she says: telluric
Italo Calvino
#51. Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars.
Italo Calvino
#52. 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
#53. Again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.
Italo Calvino
#54. The novels I prefer, are those that make you feel uneasy from the very first page.
Italo Calvino
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.
Italo Calvino
#58. At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
Italo Calvino
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
#69. I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.
Italo Calvino
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.
Italo Calvino
#73. The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. In
Italo Calvino
#74. Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find.
Italo Calvino
#75. The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.
Italo Calvino
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.
Italo Calvino
#80. Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.
Italo Calvino
#81. 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
#82. Where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third,
Italo Calvino
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#89. 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
#90. I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.
Italo Calvino
#92. 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
#94. ...
KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.
POLO: And here, in fact, we are.
Italo Calvino
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.
Italo Calvino
#100. 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
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