Top 280 Italo Calvino Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.”

— Italo Calvino

Featured in: Important Quotes, Country Quotes

2. “I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!”

— Italo Calvino

Featured in: Reading Quotes

3. “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.”

— Italo Calvino

4. “Photography has a meaning only if it exhausts all possible images.”

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

6. “The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

— Italo Calvino

7. “Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered.”

— Italo Calvino

8. “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”

— Italo Calvino

9. “Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

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

— Italo Calvino

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Italo Calvino

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

13. “Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”

— Italo Calvino

14. “The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.”

— Italo Calvino

15. “The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.”

— Italo Calvino

16. “I felt in harmony with the disharmony of others, myself, and the world.”

— Italo Calvino

17. “The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.”

— Italo Calvino

18. “Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.”

— Italo Calvino

19. “While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute. “What use will that be to you?”, he was asked. “At least I will learn this melody before I die.”

— Italo Calvino

20. “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.”

— Italo Calvino

21. “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.”

— Italo Calvino

Featured in: Reading Quotes

22. “Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.”

— Italo Calvino

23. “There is no language without deceit.”

— Italo Calvino

24. “The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.”

— Italo Calvino

25. “When I’m writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I’ve really done and to compare my intentions with the result.”

— Italo Calvino

26. “Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function.”

— Italo Calvino

27. “Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt.”

— Italo Calvino

28. “L’umano arriva dove arriva l’amore, non ha confini se non quelli che gli diamo.”

— Italo Calvino

29. “Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.”

— Italo Calvino

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

30. “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

31. “Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.”

— Italo Calvino

32. “In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.”

— Italo Calvino

33. “Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”

— Italo Calvino

34. “Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”

— Italo Calvino

35. “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.”

— Italo Calvino

36. “I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.”

— Italo Calvino

37. “You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.”

— Italo Calvino

38. “Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”

— Italo Calvino

39. “Then Marco Polo spoke: “Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night’s frost forced it to desist.”

— Italo Calvino

40. “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.”

— Italo Calvino

41. “A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city.”

— Italo Calvino

42. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

— Italo Calvino

43. “To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.”

— Italo Calvino

44. “It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.”

— Italo Calvino

45. “You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.”

— Italo Calvino

46. “In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don’t cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.”

— Italo Calvino

47. “In abortion, the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman.”

— Italo Calvino

48. “If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave-What story down there awaits its end?-he asks, anxious to hear the story.”

— Italo Calvino

49. “Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find.”

— Italo Calvino

50. “When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign – a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don’t want to hear the word mentioned.”

— Italo Calvino