Top Italo Calvino Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Italo Calvino Biography

Italo Calvino (Italian: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]; 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952–1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).

Read about Italo Calvino in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Italo Calvino Quotes

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. 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. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

Cities, Maybe, Opacity, People, Subtraction, Writing

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Book, Knows, Philosophical, Reading, Toward

In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

Abortion, Persons, Massacred, Woman, Physically

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

Stars, Fall, Sunset, Say, Sky

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Attraction, Fact, Limits, Literature, Stretches, Struggle

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.

Cities, City, Continue, Ends, Exhaust, Shapes

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Lightness, Melancholy, Sad, Sadness, Taken

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like," they say to me, "but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.

Airports, Changes, Details, Flight, Leave, Names

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

Acquire, Ghost, Ghosts, Voice, Voices, Within You

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

Thinking, Disappear, Fragments, Time, Think, Love

Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.

Already, Book, Confirm, Life, May, Trying

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.

Conservatives, Formalistic, Revolution, Revolutionaries, Revolutionary

Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.

Believe, Dispensing, Essentials, People, Realize

There is still one of which you never speak. ' Marco Polo bowed his head. 'Venice,' the Khan said. Marco smiled. 'What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?' The emperor did not turn a hair. 'And yet I have never heard you mention that name. ' And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.

Believe, Hair, Khan, Mention, Saying, Venice

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

Book, Books, Journey, Journeys, People

New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

America, Horror, New York, Place, Provinces, York

For the man who thought he was Man there is no salvation.

Men, He Man, Salvation, Man, Thought

I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the Moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky, and the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

Distinguish, Dog, Moon, Night, Shape, Sky

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.

Land, Language, Ocean, Prohibitions, Unconscious

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they area dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

Book, Cast, Distance, Dream, Toward

1