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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible

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
Writing
Legible
Confining
Immensity
Becomes

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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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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There is no language without deceit.
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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
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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
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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.
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Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.
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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.
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The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
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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.
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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
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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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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
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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.
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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
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New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.
Italo Calvino
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I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.
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.
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