The cultivated person's first duty is to be always prepared to rewrite the encyclopedia.

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.

Experience is not necessarily accumulated over the extent of time lived. In my opinion, it is accumulated over the degree and variety of activities a person has been involved in

At a lecture I am asked to pronounce my name three times. I try to be slow and emphatic, "Anaïs - Anaïs - Anaïs. You just say "Anna" and then add "ees," with the accent on the "ees."

An important mark of a good leader [is] to know you don’t know it all and never will.

If you have written something that the film people want, like a book, it does give you a way in.

I repeatedly refuse to make any practical decisions. I get a feeling of nausea about practicality.

Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty, believe me, that angel's hand is there.

It goes without saying that when survival is threatened, struggles erupt between peoples, and unfortunate wars between nations result.

Worrying about the future is a thing of the past. I don't think about it.

As a natural process, of the same character as the development of a tree from its seed, or of a fowl from its egg, evolution excludes creation and all other kinds of supernatural intervention.