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Italo Calvino citations
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Italo Calvino, né le 15 octobre 1923 à Santiago de Las Vegas et mort le 19 septembre 1985 à Sienne , est un écrivain italien et un philosophe du XXe siècle.

Calvino est à la fois un théoricien de la littérature, un écrivain réaliste, mais aussi et surtout, pour le grand public, un fabuliste plein d'humour : sa production très riche fait de lui l'un des plus grands écrivains italiens de la période moderne.

D'abord attiré par la veine néoréaliste de l'après-guerre italienne, Calvino s'oriente ensuite vers la littérature populaire, en particulier vers l'univers de la fable, et devient membre de l'Oulipo. Dans la trilogie Nos ancêtres qui comprend Le Vicomte pourfendu , Le Baron perché et Le Chevalier inexistant , il exploite la veine fantastique en mêlant le cadre de la fable et l'allégorique. Il en ressort une morale qui est d’abord une invitation à la nuance, avec même un certain pessimisme dans le dernier roman. Le romancier continue d'ailleurs à traiter dans ses œuvres de la réalité quotidienne comme dans Marcovaldo, roman en deux parties paru en 1958 et 1963. Italo Calvino lisait de nombreux livres de Maupassant qui l'a beaucoup inspiré pour ses nouvelles.

Parallèlement à l'écriture littéraire, Italo Calvino a collaboré à divers scénarios pour le cinéma. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. octobre 1923 – 19. septembre 1985
Italo Calvino photo
Italo Calvino: 47   citations 3   J'aime

Italo Calvino citations célèbres

“Déblayer la neige n'est pas un jeu d'enfant, surtout quand on a l'estomac presque vide, mais pour Marcovaldo, la neige était comme une amie, comme un élément qui annulait les murs qui emprisonnaient sa vie.”

Italo Calvino livre Marcovaldo

Marcovaldo

“Écouter quelqu’un qui lit à haute voix, ce n’est pas la même chose que lire en silence. Quand tu lis, tu peux t’arrêter, ou survoler les phrases : c’est toi qui décides du rythme. Quand c’est un autre qui lit, il est difficile de faire coïncider ton attention avec le tempo de sa lecture : sa voix va ou trop vite ou trop lentement.”

Italo Calvino

, 1979)

“Sous les murs rouges de Paris, s’était déployée l’armée de France : Charlemagne devait passer les paladins en revue. Ils attendaient depuis trois grandes heures, dans la touffeur d’un après-midi de début d’été, un peu couvert, nuageux; on mitonnait dans les cuirasses, comme dans des marmites mises à cuire à feu doux. Peut-être bien que, dans cet alignement imperturbable de chevaliers, quelqu’un déjà s’était évanoui, ou simplement assoupi : de toute façon, l’armure les maintenait bien cambrés sur leur selle, tous pareils.”

Italo Calvino livre Le Chevalier inexistant

Incipit du roman.
Le Chevalier inexistant (Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959)

Italo Calvino: Citations en anglais

“The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand”

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Italo Calvino livre Invisible Cities

Page 10
Invisible Cities (1972)
Contexte: As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. (di quest'onda che rifluisce dai ricordi la città s'imbeve coma una spugna e si dilata). The city, however, does not tell of its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand...

“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…”

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Italo Calvino

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.”

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Italo Calvino

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“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.”

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Italo Calvino

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

“"Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."”

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Italo Calvino livre Invisible Cities

Page 82.
Invisible Cities (1972)

“Gore is a man without an unconscious.”

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Italo Calvino

On friend and author Gore Vidal, as quoted in "GORE VIDAL, 1925-2012 : Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer" in The New York Times (1 August 2012) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/01/books/gore-vidal-elegant-writer-dies-at-86.html?pagewanted=all

“What makes love making and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space”

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Italo Calvino

"If on a winter's night a traveller". Chapter 7. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver (1981).

“Then we have computer science. It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware. But it is the software that gives the orders, acting on the outside world and on machines that exist only as functions of software and evolve so that they can work out ever more complex programs. The second industrial revolution, unlike the first, does not present us with such crushing images as rolling mills and molten steel, but with "bits" in a flow of information traveling along circuits in the form of electronic impulses. The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits.”

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Italo Calvino livre Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) , "Lightness"
English translation: Patrick Creagh (1996).

“In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language.”

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Italo Calvino livre Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988)
English translation: Patrick Creagh (1996).

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

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Italo Calvino livre Invisible Cities

Final paragraph.
Invisible Cities (1972)

“I set my hand to the art of writing early on. Publishing was easy for me, and I at once found favor and understanding. But it was a long time before I realized and convinced myself that this was anything but mere chance.
Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.
Your first book already defines you, while you are really far from being defined. And this definition is something you may then carry with you for the rest of your life, trying to confirm it or extend or correct or deny it; but you can never eliminate it.”

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Italo Calvino livre The Path to the Nest of Spiders

The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), Preface
English translation: Archibald Colquhoun (1957), HarperCollins.

“He was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful—the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.”

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Italo Calvino livre The Baron in the Trees

The Baron in the Trees (1957), Chapter 16; English translation: Archibald Colquhoun (1959).

“And he waves the pages of the papers, black and white the way space was when the galaxies were being formed, and crammed—as space was then—with isolated corpuscles, surrounded by emptiness, containing no destination or meaning. And I think how beautiful it was then, through that void, to draw lines and parabolas, pick out the precise point, the intersection between space and time where the event would spring forth, undeniable in the prominence of its glow; whereas now events come flowing down without interruption, like cement being poured, one column next to the other, one within the other, separated by black and incongruous headlines….”

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Italo Calvino livre Cosmicomics

Pages 92-93, "How Much Shall We Bet?"
Cosmicomics (1965)

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