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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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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
Inexhaustible
Underneath
Venture
Surface
Seek
Come
Things
More quotes by Italo Calvino
The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
Italo Calvino
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
Italo Calvino
The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
Italo Calvino
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
Italo Calvino
Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.
Italo Calvino
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
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
The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.
Italo Calvino
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Italo Calvino
Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
Italo Calvino
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, Polo said. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.
Italo Calvino
