Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.

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.

Without work, time cannot be converted and it will waste away.

The outcome of insane parents is either a murderer or an intellectual.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Nothing is accomplished all at once, and it is one of my great maxims, and one of the most completely verified, that Nature makes no leaps: a maxim which I have called the law of continuity.

He was a great man. And he was also me.

Misfortune is a fact of nature acceptable to women, especially when it falls on other women.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

...my camera is my friend, and I take it everywhere.

I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again.

You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.