The author may not interpret. But he must tell why and how he wrote his book.

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.

Alone, we are great, but together, we are better.

My spouse is my shield, my spouse is my strength.

The Communist regime didn't consider this to be a shining moment in history and assigned no heroism to it. They classified it as merely an accident.

We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy: they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too.

The eternal sound of the sea on every side has a tendency to wear away the edge of human thought and perception.

Consider The lilies of the field whose bloom is brief:-- We are as they; Like them we fade away As doth a leaf.

When I became my masked identity I was this incredible little nerd, but in the real world I had to be this tough kid from the neighborhood.

Madame de Stael thought it was pride in mankind to endeavour to penetrate the secret of the universe; and speaking of the higher metaphysics she said: "I prefer the Lord's Prayer to it all."

I'm tired of people thinking they're doing me favours.