Poetry is not a matter of feelings, it is a matter of language. It is language which creates feelings.

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.

We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

I always wanted to be a snake. Every time I saw a snake on TV. I'd always say 'Why not me?'

Everyone picked on me in school because I was in foster care.

In order to succeed, you can't be afraid to fail. Just do it and don't let anybody tell you you can't.

Ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins. There has to be an interim of death or rejection before there can be renewal and reform.

For f*ck's sake, get off the cross. Someone else needs the wood" ~Zsadist

I'm sprouting more than one wonderful grey hair.

When your child is very young, you must protect him from doing harm to himself and others, then later by precept, explaining to him what is going to be for his eventual happiness.

We cannot "psychologize" the grace of God. God's actions are outside and above our human sciences.

Write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others. When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it.

But the validity of a doctrine does not depend on whose ox it gores.