List of Italo Calvino Quotes

Novels As Dull As Dishwater, With The Grease Of Random Sentiments Floating On Top.

Reading Is Going Toward Something That Is About To Be, And No One Yet Knows What It Will Be.

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.

If A Lover Is Wretched Who Invokes Kisses Of Which He Knows Not The Flavor, A Thousand Times More Wretched Is He Who Has Had A Taste Of The Flavor And Then Had It Denied Him.

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.

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.

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.

Work Stops At Sunset. Darkness Falls Over The Building Site. The Sky Is Filled With Stars. "there Is The Blueprint," They Say.

Now, The Old Man Happened To Be The Lord.

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.

You Are About To Begin Reading Italo Calvino's New Novel, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler.

...and Every Wednesday The Perfumed Young Lady Slips Me A Hundred-crown Note To Leave Her Alone With The Convict. And By Thursday The Hundred Crowns Are Already Gone In So Much Beer. And When The Visiting Hour Is Over, The Young Lady Comes Out With The Stink Of Jail In Her Elegant Clothes; And The Prisoner Goes Back To His Cell With The Lady's Perfume In His Jailbird's Suit. And I'm Left With The Smell Of Beer. Life Is Nothing But Trading Smells.