If western culture is shown to be rich it is because, even before the Enlightenment, it has tried to "dissolve" harmful simplifications through inquiry and the critical mind.

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.

What are we before love? But thoughts floating upon a sea. Searching for a shore to explore, to gaze into infinity.

If we never have headaches through rebuking our children, we shall have plenty of heartaches when they grow up.

We are not damned. We never were. Who under the sun has the right to damn any living breathing creature?

I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

Even I don't know what I'm saying most of the time.

I still collect toys. Toys are a reflection of society. They are the tools that society uses to teach and enculturate children into the adult world. Toys are not innocent.

Leisure with dignity.

You white folks see UFOs in your dreams. You don't hear about Martians in Harlem.

Problems look mighty small from 150 miles up.

Rather hang thyself than belong to the horde of successful imitators.