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Quotes About Creativity

This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!
~ Italo Calvino
All this is like a dream which the word bears within itself and which, passing through him who writes, is freed and frees him.
~ Italo Calvino
The facility of the entrance into another world is an illusion: you start writing in a rush, anticipating the happiness of a future reading, and the void yawns on the white page.
~ Italo Calvino
The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.
~ Italo Calvino
We'll invent new ways of being together.
~ Italo Calvino
nh?ng có lúc ngòi bút ch? rào r?o b?i m?c, không l?n ch?y b?ng m?t gi?t ??i, và cu?c ??i thì toàn b? ?n goài kia, bên ngoài ô c?a s?, bên ngoài b?n, và b?n c?m th?y mình s? không bao gi? còn có th? n??ng náu n?i trang gi?y b?n ?ang vi?t
~ Italo Calvino
Whatever person you decide to photograph, or whatever thing, you must go on photographing it always, exclusively, at every hour of the day and night. Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images." - from "The Adventure of a Photographer
~ Italo Calvino
There: the white butterfly has crossed the whole valley, and from the reader's book has flown here, to light on the page I am writing.
~ Italo Calvino
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
~ Italo Calvino
Fantasy is a place where it rains.
~ Italo Calvino
Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature. Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.
~ Italo Calvino
Scrivere è sempre nascondere qualcosa in modo che venga poi scoperto.
~ Italo Calvino
The book should be the written counterpart of the unwritten world; its subject should be what does not exist and cannot exist except when written, but whose absence is obscurely felt by that which exists, in its own incompleteness.
~ Italo Calvino
Il libro dovrebb'essere la controparte scritta del mondo non scritto; la sua materia dovrebbe essere ciò che non c'è né potrà esserci se non quando sarà scritto, ma di cui ciò che c'è sente oscuramente il vuoto nella propria incompletezza.
~ Italo Calvino
A poor writer is one who names rather than represents.
~ Italo Calvino
What if it were as they say? If, while I believe I am writing in fun, what I write were really dictated by the extraterrestrials?
~ Italo Calvino
if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines […], a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.
~ Italo Calvino
Eu chegara ao limiar da adolescência e ainda me ocultava entre as raízes das grandes árvores do bosque para me contar histórias. Uma agulha de pinheiro podia representar para mim um cavaleiro ou uma dama ou um bufão; movimentava-a diante de meus olhos e me exaltava em relatos intermináveis. Depois ficava com vergonha dessas fantasias e fugia.
~ Italo Calvino
l'arte di scriver storie sta nel saper tirare fuori da quel nulla che si è capito della vita tutto il resto. ma finita la pagina si riprende la vita e ci s'accorge che quel che si sapeva è proprio un nulla.
~ Italo Calvino
Ogni vita è un enciclopedia, una biblioteca, un campionario di stili, dove tutto può essere continuamente rimescolato e riordinato in tutti i modi possibili
~ Italo Calvino
Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," "Today it is windy"?
~ Italo Calvino
And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller.
~ Italo Calvino
If I knew how to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subject and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognize my moods in the motionless suffering of things. Miss
~ Italo Calvino
La fantasia è una specie di macchina elettronica che tiene conto di tutte le combinazioni possibili e sceglie quelle che rispondono ad un fine, o che semplicemente sono le più interessanti, piacevoli, divertenti.
~ Italo Calvino