Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.

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.

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do.

From the beginning and end of every adversity, the light of a virtuous woman will always shine.

You're trying to eat grass that isn't there. Why don't you give it a chance to grow?

Longbottom, if brains were gold, you'd be poorer than Weasley, and that's saying something.

There is a fascination with fear. It grabs our attention.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government.

Leadership is about making decisions with the information you have, not the information people will have 12 years later, i kind of feel sorry for my friend Jeb Bush.

There is no knife that cuts so sharply and with such poisoned blade as treachery.

Do not allow doubt to distract you if only you will install in the altar of your heart steady faith in My Divinity, you can win a vision of My Reality.