Quote

The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.

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
Book
Figure
Giving
Figures
Thing
Gives
World
Says
Looking
Blurred
Sense
Volume
Ends
Holds
Everything
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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.
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There is no language without deceit.
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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.
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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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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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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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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.
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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.
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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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.
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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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The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like, they say to me, but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
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