I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then.

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.

Ideas are seeds of existence in absolute emptiness.Creative words are the building blocks of such ideas.

To say something nice about themselves this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do.

You can't possibly predict what will last or not. But once you attempt to write for the ages, you're doomed.

You ate something yesterday.You sure?"asked Simon Jace shrugged."Well,I wouldnt swear on a stack of Bibles.I think it was yesterday,though.

ALL MEANINGFUL KNOWLEDGE IS FOR THE SAKE OF ACTION, AND ALL MEANINGFUL ACTION FOR THE SAKE OF FRIENDSHIP.

I ask all Americans with a conscience to shun anything and everything to do with the murderous state of Georgia.

Sin is powerful, but not as powerful as the liberating power of grace.

Hollywood has gone from Pola to Polaroid.

I do verily believe that a single, consolidated government would become the most corrupt government on the earth.

Anyone who's a parent dreads that call in the middle of the night. I have four grown children and I still dread it.