Italo Calvino Quotes

Without translation, I would be limited to the borders of my own country. The translator is my most important ally. He introduces me to the world.

You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young.

Each sort of cheese reveals a pasture of a different green, under a different sky.

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

There is no language without deceit.

Novelists tell that piece of truth hidden at the bottom of every lie.

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

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

Every time I must find something to do that will look like something a little beyond my capabilities.

At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it.

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?

...Life is nothing but trading smells.

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

Knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world.

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

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

It is within you that the ghosts acquire voices.

The universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.