I have a good memory. But I would be interested in memory even if I had a bad memory, because I believe that memory is our soul. If we lose our memory completely, we are without a soul.

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.

We are nearer to him than his jugular vein.

With a sense of humor like that, you could make a living as a garbage man anywhere in the country.

A great step toward independence is a good-humoured stomach.

Don't go to the grave with life unused.

He who could have been a torch and stoops to being a pair of jaws is a deserter.

I've done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I've found no evidence that it brings happiness.

The truth about the life of a man is not what he does, but the legend which he creates around himself.

I found the blues too limiting, and classical was too disciplined.

It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.

In the annals of history, few men have left a more positive imprint on the world than Pope John Paul II.