If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.

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.

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

Hope is a pleasant acquaintance but an unsafe friend.

Listening to Benny [Goodman] talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel.

One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term 'duty.

What do you think you should do if you're attacked by a bear? Play dead? No - that's a lie promoted by the bears.

Good workemen are seldome rich.

I was a farm kid from the plains of South Venezuela, from a very poor family. I grew up in a palm tree house with an earthen floor.

The most skillful flattery is to let a person talk on, and be a listener.

Sports have become increasingly more specialized, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be fun.

I often go to bed in my birthday suit. But I like teddies and cute little undies that match. I like a sexy bra and panty set, or little shorts.

It's not easy to take a sit-com and turn it into a feature.