Italo Calvino

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

— Italo Calvino

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

— Italo Calvino

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

— Italo Calvino

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

— Italo Calvino

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.

— Italo Calvino

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

— Italo Calvino

“One can gain more truth from the exception than from the rule”

— Italo Calvino

Reading is a possession, a march toward a possession.

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing…

— Italo Calvino

“I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.”

— Italo Calvino

Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are…

— Italo Calvino

“It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at…

— Italo Calvino

“Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.' Polo answers: 'Without stones…

— Italo Calvino

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's…

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

“In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travelers overtaken by night on their…

— Italo Calvino

“The lawn mower attends with defeaning shudder to the tonsure; a light odor of fresh hay intoxicates the air; the leveled grass…

— Italo Calvino

“To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like…

— Italo Calvino

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd,…

— Italo Calvino

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet…

— Italo Calvino

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking…

— Italo Calvino

“In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes…

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

“Hay días en los que cada cosa que veo parece cargada de significados: mensajes que me sería difícil comunicar a otros, definir,…

— Italo Calvino

“Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object,…

— Italo Calvino

“The iguana room of the Jardin des Plantes, with its illuminated cases, where dozing reptiles are hidden among branches and rocks and…

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

“That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own…

— Italo Calvino

“Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of…

— Italo Calvino

“It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no…

— Italo Calvino

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

— Italo Calvino

“again I am torn between the necessity and the impossibility of answering.”

— Italo Calvino

“In museums I always enjoy stopping at the Saint Jeromes.”

— Italo Calvino

“Contemporaries cannot be good judges.”

— Italo Calvino

“[...] a życie to tylko tarzanie się między łóżkiem a trumną [...]”

— Italo Calvino

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

— Italo Calvino

“I've been in love for five hundred million years…”

— Italo Calvino

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.

— Italo Calvino