Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis. The most exciting letters I received were from people in places like that.

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.

It will be found that every attack upon religion, or upon characteristic ideas inherited from religion, when its assumptions are laid bare, turns out to be an attack upon mind.

From silly devotions and from sour-faced saints good Lord deliver us.

What does it cost us to say: "My God help me! Have mercy on me!" Is there anything easier than this? And this little will suffice to save us if we be diligent in doing it.

The public always prefers to be reassured. There are those whose job this is. There are only too many.

Told me my tape taught them to swear. What about the make-up you allow your 12 year old daughter to wear?

I am a believer in trying to treat people properly and trying to respond and making sure that I find the time to be courteous.

A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare.

I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.

The people you hate, well, this is the question about such people: why do you hate them?

It is pointless to say that this or that night was the worst of my life. I have so many bad nights to choose from that I've made none the champion.