Italo Calvino Quotes & Sayings

Personally, I believe in fiction because the stories I like are those with a beginning and an end. — Italo Calvino

How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot? You had flung yourself into the action, filled with adventurous impulses: and then? Your function was quickly reduced to that of one who records situations decided by others, who submits to whims, finds himself involved in events that elude his control. Then what use is your role as protagonist to you? If you continue lending yourself to this game, it means that you, too, are an accomplice of the general mystification. — Italo Calvino

Meanwhile, in the satisfaction you receive from her way of reading you, from the textual quotations of your physical objectivity, you begin to harbor a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you. — Italo Calvino

The seventh reader interrupts you: "Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could only end in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death."
You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla. — Italo Calvino

And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller. — Italo Calvino

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. — Italo Calvino

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. (Terence sent me this quote the other day. A good battle cry, I believe ... and one I wholeheartedly respect.) — Italo Calvino

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have. — Italo Calvino

We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have all been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like? — Italo Calvino

The dream of being invisible ... When I find myself in an environment where I can enjoy the illusion of being invisible, I am really happy. — Italo Calvino

This thought has always filled me with terror: that I might be one of those people, that I might be only one of those people. — Italo Calvino

I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

How well I would write if I were not here! — Italo Calvino

They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now. — Italo Calvino

We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I've ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

Bringing a child into the world makes sense only if this child is wanted consciously and freely by its two parents. If it is not, then it is simply animal and criminal behavior. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

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.* — Italo Calvino

I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting. Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a river-bank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes stared into each other's with the intensity of serpents' - serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cru-zana, and enchiladas. — Italo Calvino

Reader, what are you doing? Aren't you going to resist? Aren't you going to escape? Ah, you are participating ... Ah, you fling yourself into it, too ... You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters? Like this, without any preparation..? — Italo Calvino

Creating a space and time for reflection and imagination and study presupposes an accumulation of wealth, and behind every accumulation of wealth there are obscure lives subject to labour and sacrifices and oppression without any hope. Every project or image that allows us to to reach out towards another way of being outside the injustice that surrounds us carries the mark of the injustice without which it could not have been conceived. — Italo Calvino

Although science interests me just because of its efforts to escape from anthropomorphic knowledge, I am nonetheless convinced that our imagination cannot be anything but anthropomorphic. — Italo Calvino

The contradiction [trying to use Russian model to reshape Italy] grew to such an extent that I felt totally cut off from the communist world and, in the end, from politics. That was fortunate. The idea of putting literature in second place, after politics, is an enormous mistake, because politics almost never achieves its ideals. — Italo Calvino

It's all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place. I, in fact, recognize myself here without a here or an elsewhere, recognized as an outsider by the nonoutsiders at least as clearly as I recognize the nonoutsiders and envy them. — Italo Calvino

I knew that signs also allow others to judge the one who makes them, and that in the course of a galactic year tastes and ideas have time to change, and the way of regarding the earlier ones depends on what comes afterwards; in short, I was afraid a sign that now might seem perfect to me, in two hundred or six hundred million years would make me look absurd. — Italo Calvino

One reads alone, even in another's presence. — Italo Calvino

I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place. — Italo Calvino

Fantasy is like jam ... You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing ... out of which you can't make anything. — Italo Calvino

Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book. — Italo Calvino

I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to try to erase. — Italo Calvino

Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," "Today it is windy"? — Italo Calvino

From my words you will have reached the conclusion that the real Berenice is a temporal succession of different cities, alternately just and unjust. But what I wanted to warn you about is something else: all the future Berenices are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable. — Italo Calvino

An outsider was taking my place, was becoming me, my cage with the starlings would become his, the stereoscope, the real Uhlan helmet hanging from a nail, all my things that I couldn't take with me remained to him; or, rather, it was my relationship with things, places, people, that was becoming his, just as I was about to become him, to take his place among the things and people of his life. — Italo Calvino

She's there every day,' the writer says. 'Every time I'm about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she's reading? I know it isn't a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space. — Italo Calvino

Memory really matters ... only if it binds together the imprint of the past and the project of the future, if it enables us to act without forgetting what we wanted to do, to become without ceasing to be, and to be without ceasing to become. — Italo Calvino

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top. — Italo Calvino

I sense a hint of bitterness in this letter of yours and in a previous one. Excellent: we are living in a dark period, there is absolutely nothing going right, and the only consolation we have is to think about the brevity of life. I have to say that in this situation I am absolutely fine, and I am giving myself up finally to total misanthropy, which I now discover corresponds fully to my true nature. But you seem to be still anxious about something or other. Ha, ha! Don't worry, it will just get worse and worse. — Italo Calvino

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words. — Italo Calvino

Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has always been the mainspring of culture. — Italo Calvino

I think up to a point people's characters depend on the toilets they have to shut themselves up in every day. You get home from the office and you find the toilet green with mould, marshy: so you smash a plate of peas in the passage and you shut yourself in your room and scream. — Italo Calvino

I, on the other hand, am walking through a larch wood and every step I take is history. I think 'I love you, Adriana' and that is history, will have great consequences. I'll behave tomorrow in battle like a man who has thought tonight 'I love you, Adriana.' Perhaps I may not accomplish great deeds but history is made up of little anonymous gestures; I may die tomorrow even before that German, but everything I do before dying and my death too will be little parts of history, and all the thoughts I'm having now will influence my history tomorrow, tomorrow's history of the human race. — Italo Calvino

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the sparks that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. — Italo Calvino

Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.
And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch. — Italo Calvino

A poor writer is one who names rather than represents. — Italo Calvino

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time? — Italo Calvino

I've been in love for five hundred million years ... — Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness. — Italo Calvino

So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I'm talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn't belong to us but to others. — Italo Calvino

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow 'resembles' the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the horrible scene of a crime, so that the butterfly would become something frightful. — Italo Calvino

Memory, or rather experience
which is the memory of the event plus the wound it has inflicted on you, plus the change which it has wrought in you and which has made you different
experience is the basic nutrition also for a work of literature (but not only for that), the true source of wealth for every writer (but not only for the writer), and yet the minute it gives shape to a work of literature it withers and dies. The writer, after writing, finds that he is the poorest of men. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

There is little I can tell you about Aglaura beyond the things its own inhabitants have always repeated: an array of proverbial virtues, of equally proverbial faults, a few eccentricities, some punctilious regard for rules. — Italo Calvino

This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing contrast to the general ballooning of verbiage. — Italo Calvino

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines. — Italo Calvino

Let me make one thing clear: this theory that the universe, after having reached an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again has never convinced me. And yet many of us are counting only on that, continually making plans for the time when we'll all be back there again. — Italo Calvino

What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds. We do not know if the inhabitants can move about the city, widening the worm tunnels and the crevices where roots twist: the dampness destroys people's bodies and they have scant strength; everyone is better off remaining still, prone; anyway, it is dark.
From up here, nothing of Argia can be seen; some say, "It's down below there," and we can only believe them. The place is deserted. At night, putting your ear to the ground, you can sometimes hear a door slam. — Italo Calvino

Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask, "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, "So that its destruction cannot begin. — Italo Calvino

Yell: "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

Where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, — Italo Calvino

If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects, I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things. — Italo Calvino

I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. In — Italo Calvino

The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.
[ ... ]
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist. — Italo Calvino

I know that every interpretation of a myth impoverishes and suffocates it; with myths, it's better not to rush things, better to let them settle in memory, pausing to consider their details, to ponder them without moving beyond the language of their images. The lesson we can draw from a myth lies within the literality of its story, not in what we add to it from without. — Italo Calvino

Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino — Italo Calvino

And I see the houses of the human race perched on the edge of the sea, shipwrecked in their false neighborliness. — Italo Calvino

For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book. — Italo Calvino

Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: "I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying along the streets toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path is only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothea. — Italo Calvino

It is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it. — Italo Calvino

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause. — Italo Calvino

Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face — Italo Calvino

Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings ... if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough. — Italo Calvino

The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist. — Italo Calvino

Lucretius wants to write the poem of matter, but he warns us from the start that the reality of matter is that it's made of invisible particles. He — Italo Calvino

You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him) — Italo Calvino

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies. — Italo Calvino

KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden.
POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence. — Italo Calvino

Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey. — Italo Calvino

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things. — Italo Calvino

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices. — Italo Calvino

Instead I find myself more and more outside; from one courtyard I move to another courtyard, as if in this palace all the doors served only for leaving and never for entering. — Italo Calvino

I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems. — Italo Calvino

Perhaps it is this story that is a bridge over the void, and as it advances it flings forward news and sensations and emotions to create a ground of upsets both collective and individual in the midst of which a path can be opened while we remain in the dark about many circumstances both historical and geographical. I clear my path through the wealth of details that cover the void I do not want to notice and I advance impetuously ... — Italo Calvino

In addition there is the fact that this girl's application in drawing seashells denotes in her a search for formal perfection which the world can and therefore must attain; I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; Therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know. — Italo Calvino

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. — Italo Calvino

Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly. — Italo Calvino

Fantasy is a place where it rains. — Italo Calvino

The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer. — Italo Calvino

Does the written word tame passions? Or subdue the forces of nature? Or does it find a harmony with the inhumanity of the universe? Or incubate a violence, held back but always ready to spring, to claw? — Italo Calvino

I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year. — Italo Calvino

A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno. — Italo Calvino

The only contact we could have with the void was through this little the void had produced as quintessence of its own emptiness; the only image we had of the void was our own poor universe. All the void we would ever know was there, in the relativity of what is, for even the void had been no more than a relative void,a void secretly shot with veins and temptations to be something, given that in a moment of crisis at its own nothingness it had been able to give rise to the universe. — Italo Calvino