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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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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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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
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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
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Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.
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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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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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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.
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.
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
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
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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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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
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If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
Italo Calvino
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.
Italo Calvino
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
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The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
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
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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino