The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
Italo CalvinoRead
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote introduces a journey into a new literary experience, emphasizing the beginnings of a narrative.
The quote signifies the initiation of a reading adventure, inviting readers to immerse themselves into Italo Calvino's intricate storytelling. As 'If on a winter's night a traveler' draws you in, it symbolizes not only the start of a book but also the transformative experience that literature can provide, encouraging an exploration of imagination and narrative structures.
Themes
ReadingLiteratureImaginationNarrativeAdventure
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote at a book club to emphasize the excitement of starting a new book.
More from Italo Calvino
All quotes βYour first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
Italo CalvinoRead
...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 CalvinoRead
Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
Italo CalvinoRead
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
Italo CalvinoRead
Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you canβt make anything.
Italo CalvinoRead
Similar quotes
Throughout my career, when I have been rejected, there was sometimes subtext, and it was this: People will not read your work because these are not universal stories.
Jesmyn WardRead
There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I many never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.
Mavis GallantRead
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
Ernest HemingwayRead
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed
John SteinbeckRead
But everything of value about me is in my books.
V. S. NaipaulRead
For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.
Howard JacobsonRead