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

More quotes by 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.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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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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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
Italo Calvino
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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.
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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
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For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
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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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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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What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
Italo Calvino
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Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.
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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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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
Italo Calvino
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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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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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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
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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
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How well I would write if I were not here!
Italo Calvino
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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino