Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said

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.

I do not dye my hair blackso as to be young again and sin againbut because people dye their clothes black in mourning, so I have dyed my hair black, mourning for my old age.

I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing towards becoming a champion.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

Words are more ardent if a man must struggle to find them.

When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise.

My real father died when I was two years old, so I never knew him. He was a barber in Chicago.

The wise learn from the experience of others, and the creative know how to make a crumb of experience go a long way.

The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space.

It's not so much what you do, it's just how well you do it, and that you do, do it.

Though hope is frail, it's hard to kill.