“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 dre...”
Author detail
Italo Calvino (Santiago de Las Vegas de La Habana, 15 ottobre 1923 – Siena, 19 settembre 1985) è stato uno scrittore e paroliere italiano. Intellettuale di grande impegno politico, civile e culturale, è stato uno dei narratori italiani più importanti del secondo Novecento. I numerosi campi d'interesse toccati dal suo percorso letterario sono meditati e raccontati attraverso capolavori quali la trilogia de *I nostri antenati, Marcovaldo, Le cosmicomiche, Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore,* uniti dal filo conduttore della riflessione sulla storia e la società contemporanea. ---------- Italo Calvino (Italian: [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]; 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the *Our Ancestors* trilogy (1952–1959), the *Cosmicomics* collection of short stories (1965), and the novels *Invisible Cities* (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). Lionised in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Quotes
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“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 dre...”
“You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don't say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly...”
“All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics; and I would say that one half of it should consist of books we have read and that have meant somet...”
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“To plan a book — or an escape — the first thing to know is what to exclude.”
“I do not have any political commitments anymore. I'm politically a total agnostic; I'm one of the few writers in Italy who refuses to be identified with a specific political party.”
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“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.”
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“What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on Earth...”
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“Nature in America does not arouse powerful emotions in me.”
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“An exotic birthplace on its own is not informative of anything.”
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“Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.”
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“I'm a regular guy; I like well-defined outlines. I'm old-fashioned, bourgeois.”
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“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.”
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“The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to re...”
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“Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.”
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“I'm only a novelist on occasion. Many of my books are made up of brief texts collected together, short stories, or else they are books that have an overall structure but are composed of vari...”
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“It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.”
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“Rarely does an interviewer ask questions you did not expect. I have given a lot of interviews, and I have concluded that the questions always look alike. I could always give the same answers...”
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“The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.”
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“The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.”
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“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.”
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