A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
– Italo Calvino
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.
– Italo Calvino
It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
– Italo Calvino
Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
– Italo Calvino
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
The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
– Italo Calvino
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
– Italo Calvino
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
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.
– Italo Calvino
What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.
– Italo Calvino
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.