Italo Calvino Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

View all Italo Calvino Quotes
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

Italo Calvino
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

Italo Calvino
At times the mirror increases a thing's value, at times denies it.

Italo Calvino
Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

Italo Calvino
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

Italo Calvino
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

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

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

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

Italo Calvino
In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

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

Italo Calvino
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

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

Italo Calvino
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

Italo Calvino
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

Italo Calvino
As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands.

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

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

Italo Calvino
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Italo Calvino
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

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
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.

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
Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

Italo Calvino
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

Italo Calvino
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

Italo Calvino
The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say 'I read, therefore it writes.'

Italo Calvino
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
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

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