In the United States, politics is a profession, whereas in Europe it is a right and a duty .

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.

Let us keep enough money to enjoy each breath we take, but definitely not too much, if we don’t want to spoil the fragrance of our dreams and the poem of life.

Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

Sometimes it lasts in love, But sometimes it hurts instead.

The military is faithful to the constitution. They will come in only to protect the people from the enemies of the state.

The most important job you have is growing your people, giving them a chance to reach their dreams.

The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.

It hinges on oil. Europeans feel they handled the boycott after the Yom Kippur War [1973] very badly. The Arabs need to sell oil; otherwise they cannot live.

I read a lot of true-crime books, but sometimes they can put you in a bad mood.

It was me, Austin. It was me all along, Austin!

When I was a younger man and had a life, I owned an El Camino pickup in the '70s. It was a real sort of Southern deal. I had Astroturf in the back.