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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.
Italo Calvino
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Italo Calvino
Age: 62 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 15
Died: 1985
Died: September 19
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Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
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Santiago de Compostela de las Vegas
Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli
Italo Giovanni Calvino
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More quotes by Italo Calvino
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
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
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
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
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
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
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Italo Calvino
The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
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
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased, Polo said. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.
Italo Calvino
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Italo Calvino
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
At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.
Italo Calvino
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
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
It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
Italo Calvino
The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
Italo Calvino
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. There is the blueprint, they say.
Italo Calvino
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
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
