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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.

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
Little
Principles
Many
Bits
Illusions
Important
Stop
Sphere
Every
Politics
Spheres
Believe
Sense
Cherish
Never
Helping
Believing
Men
Two
Helps
Life
Littles
Illusion

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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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.
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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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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries
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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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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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Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.
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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.
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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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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.
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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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 is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino