Author: Italo Calvino

Cited by

• Githa Hariharan (1)
  • IN: Almost Home (2014) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan's mind set out on his own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them.
    FROM: Invisible Cities, (1972), Novel, Italy
• C.K. Stead (1)
  • IN: Book Self (2008) Non-Fiction , NULL
    EPIGRAPH: I would like to be Mercutio [...] the voice of reason amid the fanatical hatreds of the Capulets and Montagues. He sticks to the old code of chivalry at the price of his life, perhaps just for the sake of style, and yet he is a modern man, sceptical and ironic.
    FROM: Hermit in Paris, (1994), NULL, Italy
• Michael Chabon (1)
  • IN: Gentlemen of the Road (2007) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: "From now on, I'll describe the cities to you," the Khan had said, "In your journeys you will see if they exist."
    FROM: Invisible Cities, (1972), Novel, Italy
• Kevin MacNeil (1)
  • IN: The Brilliant & Forever (2016) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.
    FROM: Six Memos for the Next Millennium, (1988), Speech, Italy
• Salman Rushdie (1)
  • IN: Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic.
    FROM: NULL, (1980), NULL, Italy
• Kanishk Tharoor (1)
  • IN: Swimmer Among the Stars (2017) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the forgiveness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
    FROM: Invisible Cities, (1972), Novel, Italy
• Mark Henshaw (1)
  • IN: The Snow Kimono (2014) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me...
    FROM: If on a Winter's Night a Travaller, (1979), Novel, Italy
• Emiliano Ponzi (1)
  • IN: The Journey of the Penguin (2015) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: I am rather suspicious of this imperative of creativity: I think first of all you ned a foundation of exactness, technique, concreteness, a sense of reality. Only a certain solidity can give birth to creativity: Fantasy is like jam; you have to spread it on a solid slice of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing.. out of which you can’t make anything.
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, Italy
• T. C. Boyle (1)
  • IN: If the River Was Whiskey (1989) Short Story Collection, American
    EPIGRAPH: You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.
    FROM: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, (1979), Novel, Italy