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 the continents.
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Quotes by Italo Calvino
Explore 25 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Italo Calvino. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Italo Calvino
In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.
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.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno.
It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.
A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
I suffer from everyday life.
A tale is born from an image, and the image extends and creates a network of meanings that are always equivocal.
The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
Good literature can be created only with something that is different from literature.
Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
Every time I've had to do journalistic investigations, I've cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It's the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.
I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.
What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth?
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.
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