In the United States there's a Puritan ethic and a mythology of success. He who is successful is good. In Latin countries, in Catholic countries, a successful person is a sinner.

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 media—stenographers to power.

Happy is he who learns to bear what he cannot change!

Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case the idea is quite staggering.

If you can expect the unexpected, you can emotionally lick anyone.

We will work with industrial or Dept. Of Defence sponsorship as long as we keep our principals of openness firm we're proud to work with the military, and they respect that in turn.

I think if someone else other than Reagan, someone less of a hardliner, had been in power then the breakthrough in ending the Cold War would not have happened.

When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.

Very often I'll find out at the end of a book what I put in at the beginning. A sort of process of elimination and discovery in one.

It's far easier to put your future into someone else's hands than it is to slog your way forward, owning the results as you go.