Italo Calvino Quotes
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.
It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible.
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
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 concern himself with the world that repels him.
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.
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.
The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.
The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.
Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond.
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible
The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it.
If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.
what matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it -- a plurality of language as a guarantee of a truth that is not merely partial.
The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes.
I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses.
...Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
...the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.
Reading is solitude. One reads alone, even in another's presence.
The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.
...eyes that, like those of children, look at an eternal present without forgiveness.
It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ...
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.
