Quote

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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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
Success
Sentences
Felicity
Often
Patient
Verbal
May
Rule
Involves
Writing
Result
Flash
Every
Expression
Sentence
Inspiration
Consists
Results
Quick
Word
Search
Unalterable

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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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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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
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There is no language without deceit.
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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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…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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The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
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Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like, they say to me, but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.
Italo Calvino
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The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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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Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino