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Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.

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
Little
Promise
Book
Imagination
Need
Reading
Enough
Less
Needs
Read
Unitary
Even
Comes
Readings
Going
Part
Overall
Every
Littles
Require

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
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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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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
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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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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
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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.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
Italo Calvino
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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
Italo Calvino
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There is no language without deceit.
Italo Calvino
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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 )
Italo Calvino
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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
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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
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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
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seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
Italo Calvino
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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
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino