A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Absence is to love as wind is to fire: it extinguishes the little flame, it fans the big.

There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.

I love the smell of book ink in the morning.

To survive, you must tell stories.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

There was so much testosterone in the air, I felt like I needed a gas mask.

Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress.

Il n'est rien de réel que le rêve et l'amour. (Nothing is real but dreams and love.)

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

You like? You are happy? Yes? Okay, go! Go in the street.

It's not like being a professional basketball player where you're in a big house. Maybe three, four or five guys make a couple million bucks a year, but that's it. The rest of them have second jobs.

if I were to begin my life again, I should want it as it was. I would only open my eyes a little more.

It's uncomfortable, definitely, but it's also really, really great to talk drums with kids and hear them get excited about music and talk about listening to the drums.

Laws are like spiders webs which, if anything small falls into them they ensnare it, but large things break through and escape.

I guess getting down on your knees runs in the family