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Books Quotes by Italo Calvino

93 Books quotes by Italo Calvino

All Books quotes Italo Calvino’s page

Italo Calvino muses that a novel often starts with a line that already happened elsewhere, linking the book to the world. He questions the cult of the writer‑personality, finding it intolerable. He also sees writing as a restless youth that spends energy without changing the self.

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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

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“You are quick to catch the author's intentions and nothing escapes you”

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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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Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.

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I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.

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“Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.”

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I have spent more time with other people's books than with my own. I do not regret it.

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If the reader looks, I think he will find plenty of moral and political ideas in my stories.

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“My faith in the future of literature rests on the knowledge that there are things that only literature, with its particular capacities,…

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The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable…

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The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo…

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“You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations…

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I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer... a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.

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My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place…

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I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to…

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I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else…

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The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just…

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“But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that book exists that I will still…

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“This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true…

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“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other…

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Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?…

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“1 )Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find…

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“Now she is inviting you to a seminar at the university, where books are analyzed according to all Codes, Conscious and Unconscious,…

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How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have…

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“You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't…

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“Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,' Arkadian Porpirych says. 'What statistic allows one…

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“You fight with dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when…

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“Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs…

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You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other…

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“Memory, or rather experience -- which is the memory of the event plus the wound it has inflicted on you, plus the…

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“Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, each reads in the other the unwritten story. Tomorrow, Reader and…

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“If you think about it, reading is a necessarily individual act, far more than writing. If we assume that writing manages to…

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“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you…

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“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read," a third reader says, "but at every rereading I…

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“You’ve come about your manuscript? It’s with the reader; no, I’m getting that wrong, it’s been read, very interesting, of course, now…

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“Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition, perhaps a megalomaniac delirium? For the writer who wants to annul himself…

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“Sections in the bookstore - Books You Haven't Read - Books You Needn't Read - Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading…

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“You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through…

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For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

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More by Italo Calvino

“(one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly), whether only for yourself or also for others (often only for yourself,…

“The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game…

“Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: "I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people…

“The naked man had lost hope now; he would never be able to return to the earth's surface;he would never leave the bottom of…

“The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but…

“I ask you to come down to earth," said the Baron in a calm, rather faint voice, "and to take up the duties of…

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient…

“... KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be. POLO: And here, in fact, we are.”

“And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a…

“Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not…

“Once the process of falsification is set in motion, it won't stop. We're in a country where everything that can be falsified has been…

“Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that…

We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.

“Perhaps it is this story that is a bridge over the void, and as it advances it flings forward news and sensations and emotions…

Yet, even now, ever time (often) that I find that I don't understand something, then instinctively, I'm filled with the hope that perhaps this…