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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
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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
Play
Completely
Important
Seem
Way
Ways
Mainspring
Always
Effort
Foresee
Men
Turns
Activities
Culture
Extremely
Often
Useless
Seems
Activity
More quotes by Italo Calvino
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
Italo Calvino
…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
Italo Calvino
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
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
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.
Italo Calvino
Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
Italo Calvino
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
How well I would write if I were not here!
Italo Calvino
Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer )
Italo Calvino
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
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.
Italo Calvino
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Italo Calvino
...Life is nothing but trading smells.
Italo Calvino
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.
Italo Calvino
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
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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 sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
Italo Calvino
