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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.

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
Pay
Hear
Mentioned
Literature
Politically
Word
Minded
Attention
Mostly
Also
Politicians
Much
Sign
People
Politician

More quotes by 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
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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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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 )
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What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
Italo Calvino
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There is no language without deceit.
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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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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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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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
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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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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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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.
Italo Calvino
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
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How well I would write if I were not here!
Italo Calvino
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It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.
Italo Calvino
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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
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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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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
Italo Calvino
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The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino