In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way … - Italo Calvino

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Engraved portrait of Italo Calvino, facing left

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

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About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. Lionized in Britain and America, he was, at the time of his death, the most-translated contemporary Italian writer.

Biography information from Wikiquote · Portrait adapted from Wikimedia Commons, The original uploader was Varie11 at Italian Wikipedia. (Public domain / CC0)

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Italo Giovanni Calvino Italo Giovanni Calvino Mameli

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Additional quotes by Italo Calvino

"Your case gives me new hope," I said to him. "With me, more and more often I happen to pick up a novel that has just appeared and I find myself reading the same book I have read a hundred times."

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.

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In fact the problem Leopardi is facing is speculative and metaphysical, a problem in the history of philosophy from Parmenides to Descartes and Kant: the relationship between the idea of infinity as absolute space and absolute time, and our empirical knowledge of space and time.

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