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

I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.

Italo Calvino

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.

Italo Calvino

Of course, I'm of the generation that grew up with Hemingway and Faulkner as strong influences.

Italo Calvino

I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.

Italo Calvino

Now you mustn't think that I don't have any ideas for novels in my head. I've got ideas for ten novels in my head. But with every idea I have, I already foresee the wrong novels I would write, because I also have critical ideas in my head; I've got a...

Italo Calvino

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

Italo Calvino

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

Italo Calvino

É clássico aquilo que persiste como rumor mesmo onde predomina a atualidade mais incompatível.

Italo Calvino

But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that book exists that I will still be able to read…” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can yo...

Italo Calvino

It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ...

Italo Calvino

Who are we, who is each one of us if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things we have imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly s...

Italo Calvino

[...] mi sembra che il linguaggio venga sempre usato in modo approssimativo, casuale, sbadato, e ne provo un fastidio intollerabile.

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

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

Italo Calvino

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Italo Calvino

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Italo Calvino

As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, ‘Oh corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for battle and for love, when seen from the place where your starin...

Italo Calvino

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!… I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!

Italo Calvino

The seventh reader interrupts you: "Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate mean...

Italo Calvino

These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more...

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