Italo Calvino Quotes

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

Reading 'Moby-Dick' was really a sort of transformative literary experience for me.

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

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

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

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.

I don't even know how people read new fiction anymore because there's so much old fiction that exists that seems great that's unread. It's overwhelming to me. But, I mean, I do read. But there probably haven't been many people less literate than me that have been in 'The Paris Review.'

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

In my high-minded and naive way, I believed the only books worth reading were the classics.

My grandfather had a proper bookcase of egghead books, and he gave them to me in alphabetical order. So we moved from Aeschylus to the Brontas, and I can still remember the great relief of going from the dipus cycle to Jane Eyre.

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.

I've reread 'The Secret Garden' every year as an adult. I have a battered copy on my bookshelf - it's really quite a mess! The experience of reading the novel keeps deepening for me.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

Lovers of literature will look for the remains of the golden treasure in that shipwreck on the bottom of the sea of criticism.

Every time I sit down to reread 'War and Peace' - I've read it three times - I feel as though I've lived another life.

I read one Jane Austen in college and didn't like it at all and told everyone how much I disliked it. I read 'Northanger Abbey' sophomore year in college and hated it. I didn't read good Austen until after college, maybe a couple years out.

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.

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.