Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) was an Italian novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose imaginative and intellectually playful works reshaped modern literature. His masterpieces include Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and Cosmicomics. Calvino blended fantasy, philosophy, and linguistic precision to explore the nature of storytelling, memory, and human experience. A master of fable and metafiction, he remains one of the most beloved and influential voices of 20th-century literature.

Writer Gore Vidal praised Calvino, saying, “He was the most original and delightful of modern fabulists, a magician of language who made the impossible seem inevitable.

Below, we list some words of wisdom from Calvino, drawn from his novels, essays, and lectures.

“Seek not to know who you are, but to know what you are.”

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had.”

“Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.”

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

“The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, ‘I read, therefore it writes.’”

“What matters is not the enclosure of the work within a harmonious figure, but the centrifugal force produced by it.”

“A human being becomes human not through the abstract exercise of thought, but through the concrete act of living.”

“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret.”

“One reads thousands of books to write one.”

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.”

“The more enlightened our houses are, the more their walls ooze ghosts.”

“Every choice has its history, so many moments of our existence are shrouded in the fog of forgetfulness.”

“Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.”

“The satirist is prevented by repulsion from gaining a clear vision of the world such as the novelist’s.”

“Every time I write a book, I am trying to answer a question I don’t know how to ask.”

“In love, as in gluttony, pleasure is a matter of the utmost precision.”

“The more one is aware of the fragility of things, the more one loves them.”

“Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities.”

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”

“The book I’m looking for is the one that gives me the sense of the world after I’ve finished it.”

“Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.”

“Every morning I tell myself: ‘Today you will be a man.’ And every evening I say: ‘Tomorrow, perhaps.’”

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.”

“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.”

“Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them.”

“Reading is a possession, a conquest, a continuous act of appropriation.”

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

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here.”

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