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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.

— Italo Calvino Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988)

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Notes from Wikiquote

English translation: Patrick Creagh (1996).

More quotes by Italo Calvino

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979)

Gore is a man without an unconscious.

"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."

Invisible Cities (1972)

«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»

A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Italo Calvino (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.