Top 280 Italo Calvino Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it’s all a matter of getting started. Once you’ve succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.”

— Italo Calvino

102. “I, on the contrary, have been convinced for some time that perfection is not produced except marginally and by chance; therefore it deserves no interest at all, the true nature of things being revealed only in disintegration.”

— Italo Calvino

103. “Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.”

— Italo Calvino

104. “A stone, a figure, a sign, a word reaching us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign, or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they show us, they also have a hidden face, is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.”

— Italo Calvino

105. “A writer’s work has to take account of many rhythms: Vulcan’s and Mercury’s, a message of urgency obtained by dint of patient and meticulous adjustments and an intuition so instantaneous that, when formulated, it acquires the finality of something that could never have been otherwise. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.”

— Italo Calvino

106. “The soul is often in the surface, and the importance of ‘depth’ is overestimated.”

— Italo Calvino

107. “For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.”

— Italo Calvino

108. “Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.”

— Italo Calvino

109. “Reading,” he says, “is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...”

— Italo Calvino

110. “With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”

— Italo Calvino

111. “The fact is that I find in the day’s light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night’s.”

— Italo Calvino

112. “Her breast was young, the nipples rosy. Cosimo just grazed it with his lips, before Viola slid away over the branches as if she were flying, with him clambering after her, and that skirt of hers always in his face.”

— Italo Calvino

113. “Imagine I can see her, her or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the Moon and, whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.”

— Italo Calvino

114. “Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did.”

— Italo Calvino

115. “The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.”

— Italo Calvino

116. “Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in.”

— Italo Calvino

117. “What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?”

— Italo Calvino

118. “They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other.”

— Italo Calvino

119. “POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of learn. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.”

— Italo Calvino

120. “It’s all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.”

— Italo Calvino

121. “Praise to be the stars that implode. A new freedom opens up within them: annulled from space, exonerated from time, existing at last, for themselves alone and no longer in relation to all the rest, perhaps only they can be sure they really exist.”

— Italo Calvino

122. “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

123. “It’s better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”

— Italo Calvino

124. “So our efforts led us to become those perfect objects of a sense whose nature nobody quite knew yet, and which later became perfect precisely through the perfection of its object, which was, in fact, us. I’m talking about sight, the eyes; only I had failed to foresee one thing: the eyes that finally opened to see us didn’t belong to us but to others.”

— Italo Calvino

125. “The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the little one has understood of it; but life begins again at the end of the page, and one realises that one has knew nothing whatsoever.”

— Italo Calvino

126. “I do not have any political commitments anymore. I’m politically a total agnostic; I’m one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.”

— Italo Calvino

127. “I read, therefore it writes.”

— Italo Calvino

128. “Let me make one thing clear: this theory that the universe, after having reached an extremity of rarefaction, will be condensed again has never convinced me. And yet many of us are counting only on that, continually making plans for the time when we’ll all be back there again.”

— Italo Calvino

129. “Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.”

— Italo Calvino

130. “All that can be done is for each of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it would consist of books we have read and that have meant something for us and the other half of books which we intend to read and which we suppose might mean something to us. We should also leave a section of empty spaces for surprises and chance discoveries.”

— Italo Calvino

131. “Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet’s orbit, and the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz, Capricorn, the Cepheids.”

— Italo Calvino

132. “I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I’m afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too.”

— Italo Calvino

133. “This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!”

— Italo Calvino

134. “Yes, you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is. It’s not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”

— Italo Calvino

135. “The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.”

— Italo Calvino

136. “Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations are wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.”

— Italo Calvino

137. “Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.”

— Italo Calvino

138. “But already ships were vanishing over the horizon and I was left behind, in this world of ours full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps.”

— Italo Calvino

139. “Finito il turno Arturo torna a casa, alle volte un po’ dopo e alle volte un po’ prima che suoni la sveglia della moglie, Elide. Lei, stirandosi con “una specie di dolcezza pigra”, gli mette le braccia al collo, e dal suo giaccone capisce il tempo che fa fuori.”

— Italo Calvino

140. “Or else, given that there is world that side of the window and world this side, perhaps the “I,” the ego, is simply the window through which the world looks at the world.”

— Italo Calvino

141. “You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more.”

— Italo Calvino

142. “At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, when all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”

— Italo Calvino

143. “It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.”

— Italo Calvino

144. “My brother maintains,” I answered, “that those who wish to look carefully at the earth should stay at the necessary distance,” and Voltaire very much admired the answer.”

— Italo Calvino

145. “There is no better place to keep a secret than in an unfinished novel.”

— Italo Calvino

146. “With cities, it is as if with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear.”

— Italo Calvino

147. “What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?”

— Italo Calvino

148. “But who can say that the clock’s numbers aren’t peeping from rectangular windows, where I see every minute fall on me with a click like the blade of a guillotine?”

— Italo Calvino

149. “In general confusion youth recognizes itself and rejoices.”

— Italo Calvino

150. “We live in a country where causes are always seen but never effects.”

— Italo Calvino