Not that the incredulous person doesn't believe in anything. It's just that he doesn't believe in everything.

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.

There are things known—things experienced, felt, and understood—that words hold no power to convey. Attempting to do so only dilutes their substance and does them injustice.

And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.

In order to achieve to achieve positive results, one must work for them, not hope for them

The only honest and generous thing for me to do is to give people myself. That's all I've got as an artist, so I want to do that in an unflinching way.

The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

If there's ever a character who can only serve one metaphor, I'll probably tell one story with that character and be done with it.

The dead walk among us. Zombies, ghouls-no matter what their label-these somnambulists are the greatest threat to humanity, other than humanity itself.

Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.

Forgiveness is not substitute for justice.

Most other competitions are individual achievements, but the Olympic Games is something that belongs to everybody.