Quote

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

Italo Calvino

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Values
Times
Denies
Thing
Increases
Mirror
Mirrors
Deny
Increase
Value

More quotes by Italo Calvino

Image
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
Image
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
Image
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
Image
...Life is nothing but trading smells.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Italo Calvino
Image
It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
Italo Calvino
Image
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
Image
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
Italo Calvino
Image
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
Image
For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
Italo Calvino
Image
There is no language without deceit.
Italo Calvino
Image
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
Image
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Italo Calvino