What we honor as prudence in our elders is simply panic in action.

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'll always want him. Until every sun goes dark in every sky, until I am nothing more than long-forgotten cosmic dust, I will want him. And even then I suspect my particles will long for his.

When you chase a dream, you learn about yourself. You learn your capabilities and limitations, and the value of hard work and persistence.

The hallmark of our times is change and acceleration, but we have to provide the history.

Be active! Take on responsibility! Work for the things you believe in. If you do not, you are surrendering your fate to others.

Thus, while I quaff the genial wine, I live mid transports quite divine.

I don't need a psychiatrist. I'm Catholic.

There was no glam squad, whatsoever. There were no dressing rooms. There were no bathrooms. Let's start at our base level. We didn't have toilet paper. We went to the woods to use the bathroom.

She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, "There you go." -- Willing

An agony. The exit like the entrance - but reserved. A palindrome: gut-tug.

I never want to listen to the songs in front of people close to me. There's an emotional honesty in that place where it's not earnest but it's vulnerable.