All Italo Calvino Quotes
- The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines. Confines
- Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades… All
- In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision. Gluttony
- It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. Anecdotes
- A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. Book
- The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their… Apart
- The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts. Enlightened
- The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to… Attracted
- What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts. Called
- 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… Accompanies
- The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions. Ancient
- The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city. Animal
- 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. Carry
- When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign - a bad sign mostly for literature. But… Attention
- Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist. Begin
- If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance. Darkness
- Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing… Biographical
- Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still… Afternoon
- In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the… Age
- The contradiction [trying to use Russian model to reshape Italy] grew to such an extent that I felt totally cut off from the communist world… Achieve
- 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… Achievement
- 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. Already Begun
- To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not… Clear
- Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a… Consists
- Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered. Always Means