Quotes by Italo Calvino

About Italo Calvino:

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Qualcosa che ci sfugge deve pur restare... Perche' il potere abbia un oggetto su cui esercitarsi, uno spazio in cui allungare le sue braccia... Finche' so che al mondo c'e' qualcuno che fa dei giochi di prestigio solo per amore del gioco, finche' so ...

Italo Calvino

I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.

Italo Calvino

The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours.

Italo Calvino

Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that...

Italo Calvino

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

Italo Calvino

No se asombre de verme siempre vagando con los ojos. En realidad este es mi modo de leer, y solo así la lectura me resulta fructífera. Si un libro me interesa realmente, no logro seguirlo más que unas cuantas líneas sin que mi mente, captando un ...

Italo Calvino

The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist.

Italo Calvino

From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the ...

Italo Calvino

again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.

Italo Calvino

Si una noche de invierno un viajero, fuera del poblado de Malbork, asomándose desde la abrupta costa sin temor al viento y al vértigo, mira hacia abajo donde la sombra se adensa en una red de líneas que se entrelazan, en una red de líneas que se ...

Italo Calvino

If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motio...

Italo Calvino

As far as you are able to gather from hints scattered through these letters, Apocryphal Power, riven by internecine battles and eluding the control of its founder, Ermes Marana, has broken into two groups: a sect of enlightened followers of the Archa...

Italo Calvino

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 ...

Italo Calvino

To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, a world of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed down below, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejection your present state, there is no knowing where ...

Italo Calvino

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 i...

Italo Calvino

what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.

Italo Calvino

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to l...

Italo Calvino

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.

Italo Calvino

although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic.

Italo Calvino

For Leopardi, unhappy hedonist that he was, what is unknown is always more attractive than what is known; hope and imagination are the only consolations for the disappointments and sorrows of experience. Man therefore projects his desire into infinit...

Italo Calvino

In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical...

Italo Calvino

Author Bio

  • NameItalo Calvino
  • DescriptionItalian journalist and writer of short stories and novels
  • AliasesItalo Giovanni Calvino Mameli
  • BornOctober 15, 1923
  • DiedSeptember 19, 1985
  • CountryItaly
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Politician; Journalist; Reporter; Essayist; Novelist; Literary Editor
  • WorksThe Baron In The Trees; Invisible Cities; If On A Winter's Night A Traveler; Our Ancestors; Cosmicomics; Sotto Il Sole Giaguaro; Six Memos For The Next Millennium; ; ; ; The Path To The Nest Of Spiders; The Crow Comes Last; The Cloven Viscount; ; ; Italian Folktales; ; ; The Nonexistent Knight; ; Marcovaldo; ; T Zero; ; Difficult Loves; The Castle Of Crossed Destinies; Mr. Palomar
  • AwardsLegion Of Honour; Austrian State Prize For European Literature