Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

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 own my life to the Saviour, who saved me.

A guy wants a classy girl who is smart and has goals - someone that he wouldn't be afraid to bring home to his parents.

I think that my ideas of the world are that it's random and cruel but kind of quite comical really, and therefore the humour, in a sense, springs from that.

I think it's time we women stopped carrying supplies for the entire family. If children don't have room to carry their own toys, if men don't have pockets in their pants, tougho.

Me a TV star? I've got to be the luckiest guy in the world.

The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.

Cartoons have always been an enjoyment to me... a relaxation... I get my ideas from everyday events.

I will always love gymnastics.

You want me to be all doom and gloom, or just shut up?

If we must suffer, let us suffer nobly.