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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, homogenous 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 written language.
Italo Calvino
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Literature serves to enhance and clarify differences in communication rather than diminish them in a world of rapid media.

Italo Calvino's quote reflects on the role of literature in a fast-paced media environment where other forms of communication can sometimes homogenize or oversimplify ideas. Rather than merging everything into one uniform message, literature has the unique ability to articulate and celebrate the differences between various ideas and cultures, thereby enriching our understanding and appreciation of diversity in thought and expression.

Themes

LiteratureCommunicationDifferencesMediaExpression

In practice

Example use cases

In a discussion about the impact of digital media on literature, this quote can emphasize the importance of maintaining diversity in expression.

More from Italo Calvino

The novels that attract me most are those that create an illusion of transparency around a knot of human relationships as obscure, cruel, and perverse as possible.
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Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.
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...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.
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Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do.
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The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
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Fantasy is like jam. . . . You have to spread it on a solid piece of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing . . . out of which you can’t make anything.
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