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

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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
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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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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.
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There is no language without deceit.
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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.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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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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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
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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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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
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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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The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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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.
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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.
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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
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