...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

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.

It's a tiring game resenting the scars and the fearful memories.

Maybe I do have a few more dresses, but I'm just like everyone else.

The genius' behind the new Rocky movie decided to call it Rocky Balboa so that we'll probably forget that it's number six. Or Rocky Balboa can't count past five.

I'd much rather dress like a 5 year old than a 21 year old. I'd much rather wear a puffy sleeved shirt than some low-cut top.

Can a woman entertain a man and a pet at the same time? I say unto thee, one of the twain shall suffer jealousy.

A girl playing rock and roll, it's saying I own my sexuality and I'm going to tell you what I'm going to do. And I think people just find that threatening.

Moral courage, to me, is much more demanding than physical courage.

People have to start talking to know more about other cultures and to understand each other.

Wherever goodness lay, it did not lie in ritual, unthinking obeisance before a deity but rather, perhaps, in the slow clumsy, error-strewn working out of an individual or collective path.

Our security doesn't come from turning away from the hard stuff; it comes from the knowledge that we can handle it.