Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Italo Calvino (Italian Novelist, Writer)

Italo Calvino (1923–85) was an Italian journalist, short-story writer, and novelist. One of the most influential Italian fiction writers of the 20th century and inventive of the European modernists, he drew on his wartime experiences and combined fantasy and magic realism with a hard and satirical wit. In the process, he redefined those literary forms.

Born in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, of Italian parents working there as scientists, Calvino grew up in San Remo, Italy. He enlisted in the Italian Resistance during World War II and, after the war, settled in Turin, obtaining his degree in literature while working for the Communist journal L’Unità and the publishing house of Einaudi. From 1959 to 1966, he edited the left-wing periodical Il Menabò di Letteratura.

Calvino’s first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947; The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1956,) was dubbed neorealist. Subsequently, he became increasingly interested in fantasy, folk tales, and the nature of the narrative. His early works include three fantastic ‘historical’ novels, together titled I nostri antenati (1960; Our Ancestors, 1980) and Fiabe Italiane (1956; Italian Folktales, 1980.)

Calvino’s later books include the bestsellers Le città invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities, 1974,) Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, 1981) and Palomar (1983.) In 1973, he won the prestigious Italian literary award, the Premio Feltrinelli.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Italo Calvino

The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Exile

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Literature, Books

In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Love

When politicians and politically minded people pay too much attention to literature, it is a bad sign—a bad sign mostly for literature. But it is also a bad sign when they don’t want to hear the word mentioned.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Books, Literature

Biographical data, even those recorded in the public registers, are the most private things one has, and to declare them openly is rather like facing a psychoanalyst.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Autobiography, Legacy

Revolutionaries are more formalistic than conservatives.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Revolution

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Humankind, Humanity

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

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
Topics: Books, Literature

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Storytelling

I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.
Italo Calvino

Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Sadness

Novels as dull as dishwater, with the grease of random sentiments floating on top.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction

Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Travel, Tourism

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.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Language

The unconscious is the ocean of the unsayable, of what has been expelled from the land of language, removed as a result of ancient prohibitions.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Thought

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
Italo Calvino

The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a better knowledge of the world he is attracted to, yet he is forced by attraction to concern himself with the world that repels him.
Italo Calvino
Topics: Cynicism

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
Italo Calvino
Topics: City Life, Cities

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