The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

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.

Great creativity is astonishingly, absurdly, rationally, irrationally powerful.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

Great thoughts are against all doctrines of conformity

Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.

Swimming is not a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning. That's just common sense!

The first step is to take weapons off the streets and to put more police on them.

Solve the problem of life? Live, and you solve it.

The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men's only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.

To be a preacher requires two apparently contradictory qualities: confidence and humility.

Experience is the worst teacher; it gives the test before presenting the lesson.