A library's ideal function is to be a little bit like a bouquiniste's stall, a place for trouvailles.

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.

Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters.

The climate crisis requires a bottom-up, grassroots demand for solutions because the elites in many parts of the world are under the influence of old industry.

We all make mistakes, as the hedgehog said as he climbed off the scrubbing brush

Democracy has at least one merit, namely that a Member of Parliament cannot be stupider than his constituents, for the more stupid he is, the more stupid they were to elect him.

God created... light anddark, heaven and hell-science claims the same thing as religion, that the Big Bang createdeverything in the universe with an opposite."Including matter itself, antimatter"

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

If you think about America, it is about getting your backpack on and heading out.

We never did just one take. Multiple takes. Many. I did a bunch. Sometimes I do one take. Sometimes I did 20.

The spiritual virtue of a sacrament is like light; although it passes among the impure, it is not polluted.

The talent of making friends is not equal to the talent of doing without them.