Italo Calvino Quotes

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

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

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 have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.

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.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

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

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.

Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture.

Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

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.

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.

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 variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.

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.

There is no language without deceit.

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

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

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

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

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 in doubt.

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

I am a prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.

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.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

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

How well I would write if I were not here!

…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

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 a psychoanalyst.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

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

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.

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.