I don't want to write a novel per year. I know that I need a break of one or two years. So maybe I invent some new, urgent activity so I don't fall into the trap of starting a new novel.

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.

The secret to following God's will, I discovered, usually is wrapped up in rejecting the good for God's best.

People who ask our advice almost never take it. Yet we should never refuse to give it, upon request, for it often helps us to see our own way more clearly.

Only votes talk, everything else walks.

The only Christian work is good work, well done

The legend goes that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. I was thinking... that must be hard to put all the tiny seatbelts on all the snakes.

A child regards your cheery smile as evidence that you are on his side, so he relaxes and is happier.

Be resolutely and faithfully what you are; be humbly what you aspire to be.

You can't be afraid to deal with your demons. You've got to go there to be able to write.

You can’t have meaningful political democracy without functioning economic democracy.

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.