One can be a great poet and be politically stupid.

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.

What comfort there is in the skin of someone you love!

Few minds wear out; more rust out.

Vigilance in oneself is very important. Vigilance means to be alert to what happens inside, so you can catch an old, collective habit pattern.

I have a tremendous respect for Professor [Frank Moore] Cross.

If we can hump dead animals and antelopes, there's no reason that a man and another man can't elope.

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.

Life is not fair; God is.

Jim Crow was king... and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive

Oh dear,' said Eddie. 'We'd better hurry. Tinto, call me a cab.' All right,' said Tinto. 'You're a cab.

If we remove ourselves from the world, we are pretending that we can follow our own individual enlightenment and let the rest of the world go to hell, so to speak.