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Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

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
Else
Remains
Poets
Poet
Goals
Beyond
Tasks
Imagine
Dare
Alive
Achievement
Literature
Writers
Goal
Function
Immeasurable
Hope
Continue
Dares

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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There is no language without deceit.
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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
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In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
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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.
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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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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
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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…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Italo Calvino
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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
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What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
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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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.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
Italo Calvino
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Italo Calvino
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The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.
Italo Calvino
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There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries
Italo Calvino