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

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

Italo Calvino

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing co...

Italo Calvino

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself. As a final observation, I should ...

Italo Calvino

I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting. Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a river-bank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to m...

Italo Calvino

If the spark doesn't come, that's a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.

Italo Calvino

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

Italo Calvino

1 )Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them. 2)A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical disco...

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 pre...

Italo Calvino

Man is simply the best chance we know of that matter has had of providing itself with information about itself.

Italo Calvino

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy the...

Italo Calvino

You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and therefore in order...

Italo Calvino

- ...Porque, uma vez que você começou - perorava -, não há nenhuma razão para parar. O passo entre a realidade que é fotografada na medida em que nos parece bonita e a realidade que nos parece bonita na medida em que foi fotografada é curtíss...

Italo Calvino

Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?" she added; her half smile was perhaps meant to be ironic, though to Amedeo, who at that...

Italo Calvino

I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.

Italo Calvino

It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.

Italo Calvino

I change my method and field of reference from book to book because I can never believe in the same thing two times running.

Italo Calvino

I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.

Italo Calvino

My university work was not central to my education.

Italo Calvino

I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.

Italo Calvino

Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.

Italo Calvino

A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, mo...

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