Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
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
Image
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
Italo Calvino
Image
At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo Calvino
Image
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
Image
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
Image
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
Image
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
Italo Calvino
Image
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.
Italo Calvino
Image
There is no language without deceit.
Italo Calvino
Image
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
Image
How well I would write if I were not here!
Italo Calvino
Image
...Life is nothing but trading smells.
Italo Calvino
Image
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino