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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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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
Future
Means
Give
Giving
Consists
Mean
Specific
Things
Confidence
Literature
Knowledge

More quotes by 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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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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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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It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
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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Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
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Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
Italo Calvino
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Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
Italo Calvino
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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
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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
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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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The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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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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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The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
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
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Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.
Italo Calvino
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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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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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Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
Italo Calvino