Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.

The lake and the mountains have become my landscape, my real world.

We are all potentially characters in a novel--with the difference that characters in a novel really get to live their lives to the full.

I am at home everywhere, and nowhere. I am never a stranger and I never quite belong.

I saw Mussolini tirelessly contemplate a parade of thousands of young men.

If each one of us could make just one other happy, the whole world would know happiness.

I'm a bit like a sponge. When I'm not writing I absorb life like water. When I write I squeeze the sponge a little - and out comes, not water but ink.

If your vision of the world is of a certain kind you will put poetry in everything, necessarily.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don't think an artist can ever be happy.

I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words.

Nobody me without my enemy.

The internet is now a forum for public prosecution.

Peace of mind! All we need is peace of mind!

I'm not that keen on the idea of being unconscious.

By the late '80s, I was already giving up on rap music.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you - all of you on the good Earth.

I refuse to adapt or integrate myself.

We just planted our 21st church.

The way you change and help music is by tryin' to invent new ways to play

It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.