Italo Calvino Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

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.

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.

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