Top 280 Italo Calvino Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do,′ Arkadian Porpirych says. ‘What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it? Where it is the object of such attentions, literature gains an extraordinary authority, inconceivable in countries where it is allowed to vegetate as an innocuous pastime, without risks.”

— Italo Calvino

152. “A child’s pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme.”

— Italo Calvino

153. “If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn’t agree with that memory.”

— Italo Calvino

154. “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.”

— Italo Calvino

155. “There is little I can tell you about Aglaura beyond the things its own inhabitants have always repeated: an array of proverbial virtues, of equally proverbial faults, a few eccentricities, some punctilious regard for rules.”

— Italo Calvino

156. “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.”

— Italo Calvino

157. “I have finally come around to asking myself what is expressed in that sand of written words which I have strung together throughout my life, that sand that seems to me to be so far away from the beaches and desert of living. Perhaps by staring at the sand as sand, words as words, we can come close to understanding how and to what extent the world that has been ground down and eroded can still find in sand a foundation and model.”

— Italo Calvino

158. “We could say, then, that man is an instrument the world employs to renew its own image constantly.”

— Italo Calvino

159. “When you’ve waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred;.”

— Italo Calvino

160. “There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.”

— Italo Calvino

161. “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

162. “The Sultan’s wife must never remain without books that please her: a clause in the marriage contract is involved, a condition the bride imposed on her august suitor before agreeing to the wedding...”

— Italo Calvino

163. “Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.”

— Italo Calvino

164. “The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.”

— Italo Calvino

165. “If I were to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects,” I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subjects and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognise my moods in the motionless suffering of things.”

— Italo Calvino

166. “She’s there every day,′ the writer says. ‘Every time I’m about to sit down at my desk I feel the need to look at her. Who knows what she’s reading? I know it isn’t a book of mine, and instinctively I suffer at the thought, I feel the jealousy of my books, which would like to be read the way she reads. I never tire of watching her: she seems to live in a sphere suspended in another time and another space.”

— Italo Calvino

167. “You’re the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?”

— Italo Calvino

168. “Only in a superficial sense can lies be said to exclude the truth; you will be aware that in many cases lies- the patient’s lies to the psychoanalyst- are just as revealing as the truth, if not more so...”

— Italo Calvino

169. “In an existence like mine forecasts could not be made: I never know what could happen to me in the next half hour, I can’t imagine a life all made up of minimal alternatives, carefully circumscribed, on which bets can be made: either this or that.”

— Italo Calvino

170. “We can prevent reading: but in the decree that forbids reading there will be still read something of the truth that we would wish never to be read.”

— Italo Calvino

171. “The more time passed, the less happened. The more they felt something must happen, the more the bailiffs realized they had to do something but the less they understood what it was.”

— Italo Calvino

172. “How well I would write if I were not here!”

— Italo Calvino

173. “A gentleman, my Lord Father, is such whether he is on earth or on the treetops.”

— Italo Calvino

174. “A model is by definition that in which nothing has to be changed, that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces; so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.”

— Italo Calvino

175. “A me – dice – piacciono i libri in cui tutti i misteri e le angosce passano attraverso una mente esatta e fredda e senza ombre come quella d’un giocatore di scacchi.”

— Italo Calvino

176. “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

177. “The city outside there has no name yet, we don’t know if it will remain outside the novel or whether the whole story will be contained within its inky blackness. I know only that this first chapter is taking a while to break free of the station and the bar: it is not wise for me to move away from here where they might still come looking for me, or for me to be seen by other people with this burdensome suitcase.”

— Italo Calvino

178. “We’ll invent new ways of being together.”

— Italo Calvino

179. “The unique book, which contains the whole, could only be the sacred text, the total word revealed. But I do not believe totality can be contained in language; my problem is what remains outside, the unwritten, the unwritable. The only way left me is that of writing all books, writing the books of all possible authors.”

— Italo Calvino

180. “It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse.”

— Italo Calvino

181. “What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.”

— Italo Calvino

182. “To be able to read the classics you have to know “from where” you are reading them; otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud.”

— Italo Calvino

183. “To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, a world of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed down below, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejection your present state, there is no knowing where you can arrive.”

— Italo Calvino

184. “As soon as I set foot there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known.”

— Italo Calvino

185. “Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.”

— Italo Calvino

186. “When I got here my first thought was: Maybe I achieved such an effort with my thoughts that time has made a complete revolution; here I am at the station from which I left on my first journey, it has remained as it was then, without any change. All the lives that I could have led begin here; there is the girl who could have been my girl and wasn’t, with the same eyes, the same hair...”

— Italo Calvino

187. “I knew that signs also allow others to judge the one who makes them, and that in the course of a galactic year tastes and ideas have time to change, and the way of regarding the earlier ones depends on what comes afterwards; in short, I was afraid a sign that now might seem perfect to me, in two hundred or six hundred million years would make me look absurd.”

— Italo Calvino

188. “I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.”

— Italo Calvino

189. “I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.”

— Italo Calvino

190. “Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.”

— Italo Calvino

191. “Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.”

— Italo Calvino

192. “I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it:.”

— Italo Calvino

193. “Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.”

— Italo Calvino

194. “Contemplating the stars he has become accustomed to considering himself an anonymous and incorporeal dot, almost forgetting that he exists; to deal now with human beings, he cannot help involving himself, and he no longer knows where his self is to be found.”

— Italo Calvino

195. “At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.”

— Italo Calvino

196. “The difference between the true and the false is only a prejudice of ours.”

— Italo Calvino

197. “Think what it would be like to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to cement, to plastic.”

— Italo Calvino

198. “But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.”

— Italo Calvino

199. “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.”

— Italo Calvino

200. “At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.”

— Italo Calvino