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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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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
Else
Absurd
Dream
Desires
Everything
Rules
Conceals
Even
Perspective
Deceitful
Made
Dreams
Perspectives
Something
Cities
Discourse
Like
Secret
Thread
Desire
Fears

More quotes by 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.
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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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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
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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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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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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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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.
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
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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.
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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.
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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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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
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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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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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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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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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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
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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.
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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
Italo Calvino