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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

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
Revolutionaries
Conservatives
Revolutionary
Revolution

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.
Italo Calvino
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For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.
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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
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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 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
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo Calvino
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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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Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
Italo Calvino
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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.
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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
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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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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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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
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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
Italo Calvino
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Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
Italo Calvino
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I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
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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.
Italo Calvino
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You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.
Italo Calvino