Quote

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.

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
Happened
Statistics
Firsts
Page
Everything
Pages
Book
Line
First
Outside
Every
Novel
Something
Already
Refers
Lines
Begun

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
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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.
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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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Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
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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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The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
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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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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
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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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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
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What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
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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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The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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There is no language without deceit.
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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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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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