Quotes from Italo Calvino

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

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

My university work was not central to my education.

My stories are full of facts; they have a beginning and an end. For that reason, they will never... occupy a place in contemporary literature.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.

What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth?

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they 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.

I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of various texts.

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

Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature…. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.

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 the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

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.

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.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

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.

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