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Арабские красавицы на фестивале в Дубаи. ТОП-10Арабские красавицы на фестивале в Дубаи. ТОП-10 14 самых удивительных вертикальных садов мира14 самых удивительных вертикальных садов мира Крупнейшие радиационные аварии и катастрофы современностиКрупнейшие радиационные аварии и катастрофы современности
Italo Calvino

My working method has more of...

My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. 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. . . . Maybe I was only then becoming aware of the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world--qualities that stick to the writing from the start, unless one finds some way of evading them.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

When politicians and politica...

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 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

There is nothing for it but f...

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

When I'm writing a book I pre...

When I'm writing a book I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

If a lover is wretched who in...

If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

Don't ask where the rest of t...

Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

The line between the reality ...

The line between the reality that is photographed because it seems beautiful to us and the reality that seems beautiful because it has been photographed is very narrow.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

what he sought was always som...

what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

Something must always remain ...

Something must always remain that eludes us ... For power to have an object on which it can be exercised, a space in which to stretch out its arms ... As long as I know there exists in the world someone who does tricks only for the love of the trick, as long as I know there is a woman who loves reading for reading's sake, I can convince myself that the world continues ... And every evening I, too, abandon myself to reading, like that distant unknown woman.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

If one wanted to depict the w...

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.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

Success consists in felicity ...

Success consists in felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search... for the sentence in which every word is unalterable.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

Work stops at sunset. Darknes...

Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

Though I leave the house as l...

Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

...and every Wednesday the pe...

...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

You are about to begin readin...

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

The book I'm looking for,' sa...

The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

What about books? Well, preci...

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

Perhaps everything lies in kn...

Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

Why come to Trude? I asked my...

Why come to Trude? I asked myself. And I already wanted to leave. You cand resume your flight whereever you like," they say to me, "but you will arive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the names of the airport changes.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes
Italo Calvino

The best introduction to the ...

The best introduction to the psychological world of one of the most important and gifted writers of our time.

Italo Calvino 164 quotes

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