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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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
Trading
Smell
Nothing
Life
Smells
More quotes by Italo Calvino
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
You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.
Italo Calvino
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
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
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
There is no language without deceit.
Italo Calvino
I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
Italo Calvino
I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
Italo Calvino
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
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
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
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
Italo Calvino
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Italo Calvino
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
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
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
Italo Calvino
New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.
Italo Calvino
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
