I think of myself as a serious professor who, during the weekend, writes novels.

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.

When you hunt wisely, there is no need to run afterwards.

But then, even with cuts, bruises and blood all over him, he looked like his jackass self again."- Alex Gold

I think patience is a skill and I wish I had it.

There's always the new wrinkle. One must keep one's eyes always open.

Race is an invention, not a noticeable genetic presence, and cultural traits are brute concoctions of the social sciences.

But you can't show some far off idyllic conception of behavior if you want the kids to come and see the picture. You've got to show what it's really like, and try to reach them on their own grounds.

And I also felt that no one in an audience could abuse me worse than the sort of abuse I had had at work as a psychiatric nurse.

Always argue over text so other people aren't embarrassed!

I believe there's a common ground in what all gifted writers write. It has to do with their wish to turn darkness into light.

Love is to understand, at last, the suffering of another.