It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

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.

I ... am left with the lingering feeling that the places we go in our minds to find comfort have little to do with where our bodies go.

Dogs are us, only innocent.

Africa. There are a gazillion different languages people speak there, different bone structures, so vast and different.

It's easier to make up sayings people like to hear than sayings they like to heed.

Persevere. Plan. Strategize. Focus. Breathe. Write. Let go: relax. Forgive. All this failing: take a nap.

I'm a pessimist. But I'm a pessimist with a sense of responsibility.

Never let them see you in public after you've turned 35. You're finished if you do!

I love finding songs, going through them, tearing them apart, and seeing if I can find anything wrong with them.

It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss.

I said that love heals from inside.