550 Quotes by Italo Calvino

The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

Although I am small, ugly and dirty, I am highly ambitious, and at the slightest flattery, I immediately start to strut like a turkey.

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. 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. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

Thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.

every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause.