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What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.

Italo Calvino

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Italo Calvino
Age: 62 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 15
Died: 1985
Died: September 19
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Santiago de Compostela de las Vegas
Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli
Italo Giovanni Calvino
Road
Terminology
Genius
Shortcuts
Taking
Nose
Talent
Noses
Inspiration
Romantic
Called
Findings
Nothing
Finding
Right
Following
Empirically

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
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Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.
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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
Italo Calvino
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Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
Italo Calvino
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Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Italo Calvino
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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.
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In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
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Don't ask where the rest of this book is! It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. All books continue in the beyond.
Italo Calvino
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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
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To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
Italo Calvino
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Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.
Italo Calvino
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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino
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If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
Italo Calvino
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The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Italo Calvino