The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph. - Italo Calvino
Amusement has always been the great moving force behind culture. - 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
It was the love which the hunter has for living things, and which he can only express by aiming his gun at them ... - Italo Calvino
A classic is a book that has never finished what it wants to say. - Italo Calvino
L'universo esprimerà se stesso fin tanto che qualcuno potrà dire "io leggo dunque esso scrive - Italo Calvino
Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. - 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
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. - Italo Calvino
Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes. - Italo Calvino
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand - 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
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 's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!… I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed! - Italo Calvino
[...] mi sembra che il linguaggio venga sempre usato in modo approssimativo, casuale, sbadato, e ne provo un fastidio intollerabile. - 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