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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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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
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Without
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More quotes by Italo Calvino

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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
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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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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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A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
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
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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
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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
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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
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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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Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
Italo Calvino
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
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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
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Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.
Italo Calvino
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It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence.
Italo Calvino
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Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
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The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.
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
Italo Calvino
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Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.
Italo Calvino
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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