Italo Calvino Quotes

A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read

A classic is a book that remains in print

A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

I think Jane Austen is like Shakespeare, in a slightly different way. I think people will continue to revisit these stories because they remain relevant, regardless of how you do them.

If you're looking for a book that's not been influenced by 21st century popular culture and that's guaranteed to be a good read because it's stood the test of time, you can't go wrong with the classics.

I love books that stand the test of time.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

I never read Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." I've been reading books that I should have read years ago and did not. That's one of them.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

A few times a year I'll remember that I love old literature, too. Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" is one of my 10 favorite books. I have to go out of my way to remember to pick up a book like that, but when I do I'm blown away by how very relevant it still is.

If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.

Favorite books and authors while growing up - I'd need a book to list them all. For the sake of brevity: Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, world's mythology, the Arthurian legends. And the unabridged dictionary. And they're still my favorites. They get better each time I read them.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.