Italo Calvino

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
-Italo Calvino

In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps.
-Italo Calvino, The Watcher and Other Stories

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

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.
-Italo Calvino

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.
-Italo Calvino

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.
-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

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.
-Italo Calvino

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

This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts bring with it consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it. . . .
-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

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

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
-Italo Calvino, Six Memos For The Next Millennium

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.
-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.
-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
-Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler