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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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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
Ultimate
Meaning
Faces
Death
Two
Stories
Inevitability
Life
Refer
Continuity

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The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.
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Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
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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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Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
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Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
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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.
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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.
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Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
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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.
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seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
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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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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.
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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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Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
Italo Calvino
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There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.
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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
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Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, Polo said. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.
Italo Calvino