A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.
Arriving at each new city, the traveler 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.
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?
The ideal place for me is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
One reads alone, even in another's presence.
Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined?
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.
Work stops at sunset. Darkness falls over the building site. The sky is filled with stars. "There is the blueprint," they say.
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.
I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
…we can not love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes along its own trajectory and immediately disappears.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
The novels that attract me most... are those that create an illusion of transperancy around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel and perverse as possible.
There is no language without deceit.
It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.
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...
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand
Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.
