Italo Calvino Quotes

93 Sourced Quotes

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

Italo Calvino
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
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Italo Calvino
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

Italo Calvino
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
Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

Italo Calvino
Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

Italo Calvino
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

Italo Calvino
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

Italo Calvino
If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.

Italo Calvino
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature.... Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

Italo Calvino
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language.

Italo Calvino
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

Italo Calvino
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
You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

Italo Calvino
There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries

Italo Calvino
"Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."

Italo Calvino
The gaze of dogs who don't understand and who don't know that they may be right not to understand.

Italo Calvino
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
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

Italo Calvino
And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines....

Italo Calvino
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

Italo Calvino
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
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
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Italo Calvino