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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.
Italo Calvino
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Italo Calvino
Age: 62 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 15
Died: 1985
Died: September 19
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Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Santiago de Compostela de las Vegas
Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli
Italo Giovanni Calvino
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More quotes by Italo Calvino
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
Italo Calvino
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.
Italo Calvino
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
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
…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Italo Calvino
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
Italo Calvino
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
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
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
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
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
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
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.
Italo Calvino
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
Italo Calvino
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
