“ You only have to start saying of something : 'Ah, how beautiful ! We must photograph it !' and you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lo… Italo Calvino
“ That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bin… Italo Calvino
“ You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the ti… Italo Calvino
“ A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, "How could I have lived without reading it!" and also, "What a pity I did not read it in my youth!" We… Italo Calvino
“ Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehen… Italo Calvino
“ Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in tow ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died.… Italo Calvino
“ Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someo… Italo Calvino
“ 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 somet… Italo Calvino
“ You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. …Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV… Italo Calvino
“ Don't you ever get tired of reading?" she asked. "You could hardly be called good company! Don't you know that, with women, you're supposed to make conversation?" she added; her half smile was perhaps… Italo Calvino
“ 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 un… Italo Calvino
“ To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, aworld of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed downbelow, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejectio… Italo Calvino
“ ...the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots. Italo Calvino
“ You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts… Italo Calvino
“ ...Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space. Italo Calvino
“ How well I would write if I were not here! If between the white page and the writing of words and stories that take shape and disappear without anyone's ever writing them there were not interposed tha… Italo Calvino
“ Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impa… Italo Calvino
“ I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses. Italo Calvino
“ The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes. Italo Calvino
