Italo Calvino - Literature Quotes

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Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*

Italo Calvino
In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.

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
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
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
Literature…the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be.

Italo Calvino
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
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