We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

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.

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?

Trouble seemed to follow me around. The late Tim Russert, my friend and the esteemed moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, once joked, “Richard, just don’t come to Washington.

The most terrifying thing in the world was having to give a speech at my girlfriend's wedding. I was physically shaking and sweating the entire time.

Take time to thank everyone who has helped you along the way.

The word of God is always most precious to the man who most lives upon it.

If you're middle aged... where're you going to go to meet someone? You're not going to go to a bar, you're not going to go to a night club; and there are the museums.

Yoga makes you free. It makes you happy. It gets you out of the traps that create human misery. It makes you vibrate faster.

I also learned from reading the left-wing press about the [Franklin] Roosevelt administration's indirect support for Francisco Franco, which was not well known, and still isn't.

I didn't set out to be famous; if I'd wanted that, I would have gone on Big Brother.