A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

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.

People ugly from ignorance and broken from being poor.

Worrying about the future is like trying to eat the hole in a doughnut. It's munching on what isn't.

It’s weird to think the place where we’re standing will only be a point in the sky.

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

Does Big Brother exist?" "Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party." "Does he exist in the same way as I exist?" "You do not exist.

Art... can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations.

You will not grow without attempting to do things you are unable to do.

To tell the truth, I'd scare me too.

I thought it was remarkable in July [2016] when he pointedly declined to endorse Ted Cruz at the Republican convention, because I thought that was not in his political best interest.

In the end all we have...are stories and methods of finding and using those stories.