[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.

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.

The effort you direct at finding and developing the person you are is the key to life

Read it aloud to yourself because that's the only way to be sure the rhythms of the sentences are OK.

I'm trying to sell every audience something; that something is me.

The law was given to crush our self-confidence and drive us to Jesus.

I had to remind Gary Kristen often that he was in the covers to field against Sachin not to applaud him

If you want to use your testosterone to grow hair, that's up to you.

I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning.

The party out of office becomes the articulate one.

Awe is the beginning of wisdom. Awe is the beginning of education.

Many of us have a mental conception of what a Christian should be, and the lives of the saints become a hindrance to our concentration on God.