Libraries have always been humanities' way of preserving its collective wisdom

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.

Good evening, children, ' Said Nurse Matilda, and she gave a loud thump on the floor with her big black stick. 'I am Nurse Matilda.

But that’s life right? It’s just a shitty hand of cards. But then maybe somebody pulls out an Ace, and somebody else gets a four, or a ten. It’s all in the draw and how you play it.

There is no word equivalent to 'cuckold' for women.

This wine is forty years old. It certainly doesn't show its age.

I have this wholesome disposition in a lot of my characters. A certain earnestness.

I practiced medicine up 'til now. I practice psychiatry. I shifted from different specialties. I started as a village doctor - community doctor, public health preventive medicine.

I was pissin' Vince McMahon off when the red on the back of your neck was diaper rash!

Many strokes, though with a little axe, hew down and fell the hardest-timber'd oak.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Fine artists deal with finery, but I deal with painful material.