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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
Revolution
Revolutionaries
Conservatives
Revolutionary

More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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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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.
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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.
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You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
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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
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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
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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.
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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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Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
Italo Calvino
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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
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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seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
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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
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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino
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At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
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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
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To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
Italo Calvino