The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of 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.

A wilderness experience includes a long walk back.

I trust every single person around me, and if I feel even a whiff of uncertainty I won't have that person around me.

Telling my children was the toughest part. But that's when you get strong, because you have to be strong for other people.

It is one thing to be in the proximity of death, to know more or less what she is, and it is quite another thing to seek her.

I am not a politician.

If we are to transform the world, we must first begin by transforming ourselves.

What I ended up doing was becoming an actor who didn't mind doing other people's words.

Manipulating [is] just the way to proceed, to convince that what you're doing is important. Is nothing more than that. Everyone is manipulating.

I don't want the giant ego. I don't want to become Kevin Costner, singing on the soundtrack to The Postman.

A victory which is not honorable is nothing but a defeat!