But laughter is weakness, corruption, the foolishness of our flesh.

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.

Death is a continuation of my life without me...

Life is full of risks. Death is much simpler.

Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.

Kickback is a police thriller which I wrote. I'm very proud of it. I did it in two parts for France because when I wrote it, there wasn't the audience demand for crime stuff that there is now.

I am not at all in favor of hard work for its own sake; many people who work very hard indeed produce terrible things, and should most certainly not be encouraged.

Here's my library, where I don't do a lot of reading but mostly play Angry Birds on the computer.

With independents[films] you sort of make them on the go and there is that little bit more creative freedom. You don't have the money to slow down!

You do not have a problem except the one that is in your own mind, and you put it there!

I've seldom minded other people's opinions, but the other side of that coin is that I've seldom been interested by them, um their opinions about me I mean.

I'm interested in stories about human beings. I don't care where or when they are set.