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Italo Calvino Quotes
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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
Italo Calvino
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What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.
Italo Calvino
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Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.
Italo Calvino
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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
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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
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"Now a bismuth isotope is going to come out!" I said hastily, watching the newborn elements crackle froth from the crucible of a "supernova" star. "Let's bet!"
Italo Calvino
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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
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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
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The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
Italo Calvino
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Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.
Italo Calvino
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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
Italo Calvino
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Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
Italo Calvino
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In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.
Italo Calvino
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Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
Italo Calvino
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When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.
Italo Calvino
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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
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As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands.
Italo Calvino
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Literature…the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.
Italo Calvino
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Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
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I speak and speak, … but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. … It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Marco Polo to Kublai Khan
Italo Calvino
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
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I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance.
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.
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.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
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A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.
Italo Calvino
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
Italo Calvino
Creative Commons
Born:
October 15, 1923
Died:
September 19, 1985
(aged 61)
Bio:
Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels.
Known for:
Invisible Cities (1972)
If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (1979)
The Baron in the Trees (1957)
Cosmicomics (1965)
The Nonexistent Knight (1959)
Most used words:
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literature
books
language
signs
cities
life
reading
time
speak
moment
space
inferno
read
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Italo Calvino on Wikipedia
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