550 Quotes by Italo Calvino

The Sultan’s wife must never remain without books that please her: a clause in the marriage contract is involved, a condition the bride imposed on her august suitor before agreeing to the wedding...

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. In.

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more.

If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love.

But already ships were vanishing over the horizon and I was left behind, in this world of ours full of responsibilities and will-o’-the-wisps.

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. “There is the blueprint,” they say.

We live in a country where causes are always seen but never effects.

What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one’s nose, taking shortcuts.

I report to the revolutionaries infiltrated among the counterrevolutionary infiltrators.