Memory is a stopgap for humans, for whom time flies and what is passed is passed.

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.

Now I know that anytime you see a “no trespassing” sign, it means you’ve got to go in and take a look.

Great intellects are skeptical.

You want success on different levels. I wouldn't be honest if I said I don't look over there in the pop world and say, "Man, that's attractive" - Adele selling 100,000 albums a week. A week.

It's probably similar to being in New York City and having a cab driver behind you and you're driving too slow. It's not the most pleasant thing.

It now seems certain that the amino acid sequence of any protein is determined by the sequence of bases in some region of a particular nucleic acid molecule.

The past isn't useful until its place in the present is found.

What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Be content where you are! The sooner I let go of the notion that something could only be one way, the way I had planned it, without fail, I have always gotten more done and with far less discomfort.

I really think that everyone should have watercolors, magnetic poetry, and a harmonica.

A lot of the photography I'm doing and thinking about is directed at Instagram.