And Boucard desisted, probably because like everyone else he was deeply impressed by this man who had laid all ghosts, who had lost all shadows, and who stared you in the eyes with cold serenity.

The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

True education should enhance the power of the imagination.

The limits of your language are the limits of your world.

The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it.

I don't like the idea of something being pure. It means we have to be perfect, I don't want to be perfect.

You never won’t know what you can’t achieve until you don’t achieve it.

In a sluggish economy, never, ever f*** with another man's livelihood.

Each film is difficult, in its own particular way. There's a unique set of challenges on every movie.

I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

This was one of those special occasions when I could actually feel the inner appreciation of the beauty of the moment passing like an electric current through the brush in my hand.

I think I'm making music that's pretty universal.