Quote

There is still one of which you never speak.' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name.' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

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
Name
Emperor
Stills
Saying
Smiled
Still
Head
Mention
Khan
Every
Heard
Describe
Bowed
Something
Names
City
Polo
Believe
Talking
Hair
Marco
Never
Turns
Cities
Marcos
Time
Speak
Turn
Venice

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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Don't ask where the rest of this book is! It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. All books continue in the beyond.
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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
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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.
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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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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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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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Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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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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When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
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Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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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