Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.

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.

The fear of failure is worse than the failure itself. So be bold and courageous.

Shine as if you are the sun.

A poor man with nothing in his belly needs hope, illusion, more than bread.

My fans have great senses of humor and eat too much chocolate.

I feel like Cinderella sitting in the middle of the road with a pumpkin and a couple of mice, while Prince Charming charges off to rescue some other chick.

Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.

I have a job that requires me to be in the public eye in the way that makes me extra careful about sharing information.

We were idealists. We thought that when we got the vote the whole pattern of politics would be greatly improved and would be dominated by women.

By examining the tongue of the patient, physicians find out the diseases of the body, and philosophers the diseases of the mind.

I was in a band in high school and college and I always had a love for music, but I didn't go to a conservatory or anything like that. I was fairly self-taught.