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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.

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
Falsehood
Honesty
Words
Things
Never

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
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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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
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The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino
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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 novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Italo Calvino
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What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.
Italo Calvino
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
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Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
Italo Calvino
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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
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A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
Italo Calvino
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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino
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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
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The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
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
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
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It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
Italo Calvino