As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

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.

I still remember that feeling of walking somewhere confidently, seeing him mid stride and putting my foot down just fine… but feeling like I stumbled.

Your desire for increase is a sign that we are alive

I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.

I always loved reading. I always was the spelling bee champion. I always loved words. I always wanted to know what they meant, why you used them, who first said them. I was always interested in that.

I don't mind what the role is at all; I just want to play cool characters.

States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.

I was tormented with guilt for years and years. In fact, it was so bad that if I didn't feel wrong, I didn't feel right!

I've certainly learned a great deal from my husband, though, and could never have written a book like Liquor without him and the people he introduces me to and the stories he brings home.

Piracy is not the problem, obscurity is.

If you saw a heat wave, would you wave back?