Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvinowas an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics collection of short stories, and the novels Invisible Citiesand If on a winter's night a traveler...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth15 October 1923
CountryItaly
real book reading
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.
book discovery leaving
There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries
thinking disappear fragments
…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
hate writing what-matters
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 whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.
photography ifs
Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.
library harbors
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
lying novelists pieces
Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.
lying past journey
what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
sad taken melancholy
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
writing wells ifs
How well I would write if I were not here!
running stars moving
...the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping...something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene...
reality levels literature
Whether there is such a thing as Reality, of which the various levels are only partial aspects, or whether there are only levels, is something that literature cannot decide. Literature recognizes rather the *reality of the levels.*
dream cities desire
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.
thinking sometimes young
Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.