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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.

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

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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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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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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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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It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
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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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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The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
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The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Italo Calvino
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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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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
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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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
Italo Calvino
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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
Italo Calvino