Quotes by Italo Calvino

• In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.
• It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
• 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.
• The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.
• A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.
• What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration is nothing other than finding the right road empirically, following one's nose, taking shortcuts.