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
illusion obscure knots
The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.
believe men two
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.
past branches
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
two continuity-of-life inevitability-of-death
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
writing cities people
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.
race should humans
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
differences choices renunciation
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
book reading mean
You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.
reading winter night
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
stars fall sunset
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
book giving world
The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.
inspiration finding-the-one genius
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
world attraction-and-repulsion concern
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.
opposites space duration
To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.