"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."

"How well I would write if I were not here!"

"In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don't cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps."

"...Life is nothing "but "trading smells."

"Every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing"

"The universe will express itself as long as somebody will be able to say, "I read, therefore it writes."

"So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity."

"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 can’t make anything."

"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."

"Time "is "a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible."

"If a lover is wretched who invokes kisses of which he knows not the flavor, a thousand times more wretched is he who has had a taste of the flavor and then had it denied him."

"Reading is solitude."

"The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. […] Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist."

"A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole "universe", a book on a par with ancient talismans."

"At times the mirror increases a thing’s value, at times denies it."

"Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space"

"The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss."

"...And meanwhile the Galaxy ran through space and left behind those signs old and new and I still hadn't found mine."

"Sometimes one who thinks himself incomplete is merely young."

"It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible"

"You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before"