550 Quotes by Italo Calvino

Every morning I tell myself, 'Today has to be productive' - and then something happens that prevents me from writing.

The sea where living creatures were at one time immersed is now enclosed within their bodies.

Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.

Memories images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.

For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.

New York is perhaps the only place in America where you feel at the centre and not at the margins, in the provinces, so for that reason I prefer its horror to this privileged beauty, its enslavement to the freedoms which remain local and privileged and very particularized, and which do not represent a genuine antithesis.

I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.

You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

My university work was not central to my education.