I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

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'm sick of people lying to me for my own good when really it's for there own good.

Gold conjures up a mist about a man, more destructive of all his old senses and lulling to his feelings than the fumes of charcoal.

You may lose many things in the way you have chosen, don't look back but serve your purpose.

I wasn't a vegan when I came to Congress. It was a decision I made soon after I got here, and it's had such a positive impact on my life that I decided to try to help others as well.

Desires, memories, fears, passions form labyrinths in which we lose and find and then lose ourselves again.

I used to fly around the stage without strings or camera tricks. That took seven years to create.

An exact science is one that admits loss.

In the last few years I've been listening to jazz more than anything else. I listen to a lot of world music and experimental here and there.

The character of the subject must influence the choice of the method of its representation.

One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.