Authors — Quotes

Italo Calvino Quotes: 7

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
The Uses of Literature
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
Invisible Cities
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
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.