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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
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Santiago de Compostela de las Vegas
Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli
Italo Giovanni Calvino
Prefer
Done
Writing
Intention
Trying
Finished
Really
Result
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Understand
Intentions
Speak
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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.
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Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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...Life is nothing but trading smells.
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How well I would write if I were not here!
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It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
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Falsehood is never in words it is in things.
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When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned.
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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.
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What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
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Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.
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The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves
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The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
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There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries
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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.
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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.
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Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
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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.
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