Quote

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

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
Never
Books
Reading
Form
Persons
Person
Corresponds
Better
Authors
Book
Personally
Real
Image

More quotes by Italo Calvino

Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
Italo Calvino
Image
For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
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
Image
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
Image
I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
Italo Calvino
Image
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino
Image
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
Image
...Life is nothing but trading smells.
Italo Calvino
Image
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo Calvino
Image
How well I would write if I were not here!
Italo Calvino
Image
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
Image
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
Image
Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Italo Calvino
Image
Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.
Italo Calvino