110+ Italo Calvino Quotes On Inventive, Imaginative And Profound

Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist, writer, and essayist. He wrote numerous works of fiction, including the novels Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and is considered one of the most important Italian authors of the twentieth century. Calvino was a member of the Italian Communist Party and was known for his experimental, avant-garde writing style. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Italo Calvino on love, inventive, imaginative.

Top 10 Italo Calvino Quotes

1. A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
2. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
3. A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.
4. 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.
5. Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
6. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
7. The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
8. I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
9. 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.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.
• Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
• Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
• The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
• Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.
• Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.
• Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
• Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
• The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of 'depth' is overestimated.
• We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.

Italo Calvino Quotes About Love

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision. — Italo Calvino

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

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. — Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino Quotes About Imaginative

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

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable. — Italo Calvino

I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. — Italo Calvino

Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. — Italo Calvino

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? — Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino Quotes About Language

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. — Italo Calvino

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb. — Italo Calvino

There is no language without deceit. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino Quotes About Books

A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign -- a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don't want to hear the word mentioned. — Italo Calvino

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading. — Italo Calvino

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again. — Italo Calvino

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

Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond. — 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

When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino Quotes About Writing

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

Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered. — Italo Calvino

Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable. — Italo Calvino

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

It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible — Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino Quotes About Reading

What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space. — Italo Calvino

Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story. — Italo Calvino

The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written. — Italo Calvino

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. — Italo Calvino

I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed! — Italo Calvino

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

Italo Calvino Quotes About Cities

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

Arriving at each new city, the traveler 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. — Italo Calvino

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears. — Italo Calvino

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist. — Italo Calvino

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours. — Italo Calvino

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand — Italo Calvino

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city. — Italo Calvino

The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there. — Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts. — Italo Calvino

Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt. — 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 into 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. — Italo Calvino

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities. — Italo Calvino

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls. — Italo Calvino

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst. — Italo Calvino

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence. — Italo Calvino

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space. — Italo Calvino

The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible. — Italo Calvino

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world. — Italo Calvino

The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time. — 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

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

You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are. — 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

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

seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space — Italo Calvino

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death. — Italo Calvino

In the midst of a thick forest, there was a castle that gave shelter to all travelers overtaken by night on their journey: lords and ladies, royalty and their retinue, humble wayfarers. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow. — Italo Calvino

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. — Italo Calvino

...Life is nothing but trading smells. — Italo Calvino

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

So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. — Italo Calvino

In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices. — Italo Calvino

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves — Italo Calvino

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches. — 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

Having exhausted every possibility at the moment when he was coming full circle, Antonino realised that photographing photographs was the only course that he had left - or, rather, the true course he had obscurely been seeking all this time. (Last line of the story The Adventure of a Photographer ) — 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

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? — 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

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language. — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images. — Italo Calvino

I had fallen in love. What I mean is: I had begun to recognize, to isolate the signs of one of those from the others, in fact I waited for these signs I had begun to recognize, I sought them, responded to those signs I awaited with other signs I made myself, or rather it was I who aroused them, these signs from her, which I answered with other signs of my own . . . — Italo Calvino

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before — 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

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. — 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

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

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie. — Italo Calvino

Now, the old man happened to be the Lord. — 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

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

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. — Italo Calvino

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 — Italo Calvino

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. — Italo Calvino

Life Lessons by Italo Calvino

1. Italo Calvino taught us to be curious and to explore the world around us, as he was an avid traveler and researcher.
2. He also taught us to be creative and to think outside the box, as he was a successful author and wrote many works of fiction.
3. Finally, he taught us to be resilient and to never give up, as he overcame many obstacles in his life and career.