When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.

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.

Suffer love! A good ephitet! I do suffer love indeed, for I love thee against my will.

Nothing belonged to her. She had no home. With no home and no place and now freedom coming to her, she felt an unusual surge of courage.

Music is about your feelings.

Justice is indivisible. You can't decide who gets civil rights and who doesn't.

Pain is the only reward for clinging to impossible dreams." (Harry Braxton)

You three have done quite enough today: all of you and your feckless, treacherous god.

For once I want to have a relationship outside the public eye.

Trouble is a thing that will come without our call, but true joy will not spring up without ourselves.

I think you can love someone and be infatuated with them, too. But infatuation is immediate, while the sort of love in the West is something you build with someone. It's a trust.

Glory is like a circle in the water