Conspiracies and all the theories of conspiracy are a part of the canon of fakes. And I'm involved, in all of my writings, the theoretical ones as well as the novels, with the production of fakes.

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.

Beauty fades and the body becomes old, but nothing can dull the shine of a woman with a good heart.

I grow old … I grow old …

Charity you can give even when you haven't got.

Respect is not given, it is earned.

If you please man and never please God, you have nothing; if you please God and man forsakes you, you have everything.

Sometimes there are good reasons to do bad things.

When I played God Bless The Queen, I was wondering if they was gonna dig us, then quite naturally I'd go on and try to get it together.

Quiet is turning down the volume knob on life.

We must sacrifice something in order to make the world better.

We're created in God's image, but our souls or spirits are not offshoots of God's own Spirit - as New Age teachers would have us believe.