I was upset. I had always believed logic was a universal weapon and now I realized how its validity depended on the way it was employed.

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 judge someone’s choices without first knowing their reason.

Doubt is what keeps the heart and mind of every man alive. It 's what makes us think twice.

The wrong lover will always make your love feel inadequate.

Considering I'm a writer, you leave me strangely bereft of words.

The great object is that every man be armed.

There are moments when rather than reforming the human race I'd like to abandon it altogether and go become, say, one of Dr. O'Reilly's macaques, which have to have more sense.

You like someone who can't like you back because unrequited love can be survived in a way that once-requited love cannot.

It's always the little decisions that have the biggest impact.

Do whatever you do intensely. The artist is the man who leaves the crowd and goes pioneering. With him there is an idea which is his life.

I'm full of curiosity.