Italo Calvino quotes

Italo Calvino was an Italian writer celebrated for his imaginative novels and short stories. Renowned for works such as "Invisible Cities" and "If on a winter's night a traveler," his literature blends fantasy, philosophy, and playful narrative techniques. He is considered one of the most important Italian authors of the twentieth century. Here are 85 of his quotes:

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.

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

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

Italo Calvino

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: 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 ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

There is no language without deceit.

Italo Calvino

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

Italo Calvino

Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.

Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Italo Calvino

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

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

Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

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

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

Italo Calvino

One reads alone, even in another's presence.

Italo Calvino

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.

Italo Calvino

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

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

In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.

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

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