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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
Immensity
Becomes
Writing
Legible
Confining

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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
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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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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.
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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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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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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
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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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Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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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.
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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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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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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.
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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
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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.
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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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