Italo Calvino Quotes

"It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."
- Italo Calvino
(Related: Voice)

"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
(Related: Cities, End, Variety, Will)

"The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines."
- Italo Calvino
(Related: Living, Race, Zone)

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."
- Italo Calvino
(Related: Saying)

"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
(Related: Public)

"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
(Related: Knowledge, Concern, World)

"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
(Related: Cities, Order, Traveling)

"The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts."
- Italo Calvino
(Related: Houses)

"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
(Related: Talent, Genius, Inspiration, Nothing, Right, Road, Romantic)