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We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
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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Constantly
Image
Men
World
Employs
Renew
Instrument
More quotes by 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
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
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Italo Calvino
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Italo Calvino
What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.
Italo Calvino
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
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
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
Italo Calvino
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
Italo Calvino
...Life is nothing but trading smells.
Italo Calvino
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Italo Calvino
Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.
Italo Calvino
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
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
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
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
Italo Calvino
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
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.
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
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
