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
space giving inferno
seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space
feelings intuition ephemeral
A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan's and Mercury's, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.
distance stress differences
The close-up has no equivalent in a narrative fashioned of words. Literature is totally lacking in any working method to enable it to isolate a single vastly enlarged detail in which one face comes forward to underline a state of mind or stress the importance of a single detail in comparison with the rest. As a narrative device, the ability to vary the distance between the camera and the object may be a small thing indeed, but it makes for a notable difference between cinema and oral or written narrative, in which the distance between language and image is always the same.
smell cairo body
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.
grease dull floating
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
party commitment political
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.
book trying may
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.
revolution revolutionary
Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
men world instruments
We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.
abortion persons
In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.
sky green cheese
Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
mean giving literature
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.
men lord old-man
Now, the old man happened to be the Lord.
reading want disturbed
I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!