Italo Calvino

"The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind."

"If a book exists for you, you don't have to read the book."

"The invisible city is the one that cannot be forgotten."

"Travelling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities."

"I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities."

"Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist."

"The catalog of forms is endless; until every figure has found its city, new cities will continue to be discovered."

"The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand."

"All the maps of the empire were of the same size and represented the entire empire without distortion."

"Perhaps the only thing to do is to start a story, before or after."

"The narrative path is not a matter of inventing complications but of discovering and displaying the texture of relationships."

"What matters is not the form but the substance of things."

"To know the world one must construct it."

"The purpose of literature is to teach how to live."

"Cities are palimpsests of human intention and accident."

"I write from a desire to perfect the world in my image."

"The task of literature is to think of what never has been thought before."

"A quick thrust succeeds more than a violent blow."

"The beauty of the living world is that you have to change or die."

"Every life is a story, but not every story tells a life."

"Freedom is the right to construct your own sentences."

"In the space of the mind, there is no distance."

"The most delightful memories are those we barely notice as we live them."

"Cities are palimpsests where the past and present coexist."

"To be born is to find oneself in a world not of one's making."

"The truth is that I am a fabricator of worlds."

"Knowledge is the ability to connect seemingly disparate things."

"What is the point of a story unless it is to make us see ourselves differently?"

"Cities are a labyrinth of signs that each inhabitant must decipher."

"The danger of narrative is the danger of believing in a single story."