If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.

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.

When I stood there, looking out the window at the raindrops and thinking of everything I lost, I forgot everything I have. When I remembered the things I have, I forgot I lost anything at all.

If we don’t do our best and constantly ask God for miracles, it means we are objurgating our responsibility to God.

A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.

The quality of Moscow's hired killers had slipped since the KGB's glory days.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous... I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives.

Liberalism is financed by the dividends from Conservatism.

It's very tiring, being so old. But I do love living.

One foole makes a hundred.

He who slanders the victim aids the executioner.

Each species on our planet plays a role in the healthy functioning of natural ecosystems, on which humans depend.