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Writing Quotes by Italo Calvino

48 Writing quotes by Italo Calvino

All Writing quotes Italo Calvino’s page

Italo Calvino says a story can pull life from tiny details and make the unseen visible. He pushes back against the idea of a writer as a celebrity, preferring the quiet work of the page. He also notes that writing can feel like a demanding, endless task that consumes his restless youth.

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I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written.

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“Since I have become a slave of writing, the pleasure of reading has ended for me.”

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One writes fables in periods of oppression.

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“A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.”

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I have never loved any writer as much as Hemingway.

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Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.

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How well I would write if I were not here!

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

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Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.

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Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

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“The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.”

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

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“What if it were as they say? If, while I believe I am writing in fun, what I write were really dictated…

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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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The writer is someone who tears himself to pieces in order to liberate his neighbor.

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Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a…

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“Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my…

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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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“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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To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what…

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I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say, and…

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

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“No, writing has not changed me for the better at all; I have merely used up part of my restless, conscienceless youth.…

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My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people,…

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A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan's and Mercury's, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient…

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

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“I say to myself that the result of the unnatural effort to which I subject myself, writing, must be the respiration of…

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In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single,…

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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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“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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“How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories…

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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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I'm terrified of writing at night, for then I can't sleep. So I start slowly, slowly writing in the morning and go…

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Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way…

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The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.

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I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while,…

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Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment…

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I write by hand, making many, many corrections. I would say I cross out more than I write. I have to hunt…

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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…