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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
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Important
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Way
Ways
Mainspring
Always
Effort
Foresee
Men
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Activities
Culture
Extremely
Often
Useless
Seems
Activity
More quotes by Italo Calvino
Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
Italo Calvino
New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.
Italo Calvino
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.
Italo Calvino
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Italo Calvino
A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
Italo Calvino
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Italo Calvino
You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
Italo Calvino
Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
Italo Calvino
Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
Italo Calvino
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
Italo Calvino
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
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
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
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.
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
Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.
Italo Calvino
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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
It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
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
