I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my "Foucault's Pendulum," the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.

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.

Don't love deeply, till you make sure that the other part loves you with the same depth, because the depth of your love today, is the depth of your wound tomorrow.

This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

In a body [like Congress] where there are more than one hundred talking lawyers, you can make no calculation upon the termination of any debate.

Courtesy is not dead - it has merely taken refuge in Great Britain.

We must believe in free will - we have no choice.

Everything is change; and you cannot step twice into the same river.

We're only immortal for a limited time.

You could start at a path leading nowhere more fantastic than from your own front steps to the sidewalk, and from there you could go… well, anywhere at all.

He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.