Italo Calvino's Quotes

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

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.

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

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

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

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.

The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.

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.

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.

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