Italo Calvino Quotes

Discount air fares, a car in every parking space and the interstate highway system have made every place accessible - and every place alike.

I'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

Drive down any road, take a train or an airplane across the world, leave your old life behind, die and be born again~ wherever you arrive they'll be there first, glossy and rowdy and indistinguishable. The deep muscle of the world.

It is sad that the more 'successful' a neighborhood becomes, the more it gradually takes on a recognizable, common look, as the same banks, drugstore chains and national brands move in.

When I went around promoting 'Crumb,' there would be days I'd wake up in, like, Houston or Cleveland, and I'd step outside the hotel and get no idea where I was. It all looks the same: one big corporate, consumer theme park. It's all, 'Here's the Starbucks, and here's the Gap, and we'll go over to Banana Republic and the Cineplex.'

One of the shocking things when I go back to Canada is they cut off the tall trees - it's sort of like everyone's the same. Everyone's going to be the same, we're all okay. Just the, sort of, cultural, 'We're all okay.'

The idea is to have global standards. There is so much travel that if you just had a regional standard, it would probably ultimately have to be changed.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology, but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character, of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small, and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same.

We are turning the world into a McDonald’s ecosystem with the same species living roughly the same way everywhere.

What works in Chattanooga now works in the Sixth Arrondissement of Paris; it’s a little sad.

It baffles me that everything is so homogenized, because the world isn't, and yet we continue to support things that are so incredibly milquetoast.

TV has made everyone so vanilla it's nearly impossible to tell one anchor apart from another.

So many people want to have this typical look and this typical everything and it's all the same everywhere.

Nobody's unique. Everybody copies off of each other. Everybody wears the same type of stuff. Nobody's an individual anymore.

The world needs more standardization, less innovation.

Places have their own characters. . . . But the people begin to look the same.

Every shop in every High Street in Europe is filled with basically the same stuff. There's a street in every city of the world that has a Gap and Benneton's, and the upscale versions of those.

Everything's getting homogenized. It seems to me like music and behavior and everything else is getting homogenized.

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.

Some people will always ground themselves very strongly in a piece of soil, a grandmother's property, a tiny plot of land, and that's great. But in the Age of Movement, there's no question that the number of people who don't - or can't - is growing exponentially.

Our culture has made us all the same. No one is truly white or black or rich, anymore. We all want the same. Individually, we are nothing.

Americans are getting like a Ford car, they all have the same exact parts, the same upholstering and make exactly the same noises.

…It’s like a spiral: They keep making everything more basic so it will appeal to everyone. And gradually, everyone gets used to everything being basic, so we get less and less varied as people, more simple. So the corps make everything even simpler. And it goes on and on.

I was from somewhere else. Then all of a sudden I was here, in New York. With one suitcase.