Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are always remaking history. Our memory is always an interpretive reconstruction of the past, so is perspective.
Writing doesn't mean necessarily putting words on a sheet of paper. You can write a chapter while walking or eating.
There are four types: the cretin, the imbecile, the stupid and the mad. Normality is a balanced mixture of all four.
I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.
If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you're an idiot.
Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges.
Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.
I felt no passion, no jealousy, no nostalgia. I was hollow, clear-headed, clean, and as emotionless as an aluminum pot.
I always assume that a good book is more intelligent than its author. It can say things that the writer is not aware of.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
It comes down to a question of attention: it's difficult to use the Net distractedly, unlike the television or the radio.
Not bad, not bad at all," Diotallevi said. "To arrive at the truth through the painstaking reconstruction of a false text.
When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.
And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?
True learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth.
But the purpose of a story is to teach and to please at once, and what it teaches is how to recognize the snares of the world.
I don't see the point of having 80 million people online if all they are doing in the end is talking to ghosts in the suburbs.
You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this world properly you have to rewrite your own horoscope day by day.
It was awkward, revisiting a world you have never seen before: like coming home, after a long journey, to someone else’s house.
It takes a little time, but the pleasures of cooking begin before the pleasures of the palate, and preparing means anticipating.
Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.
Followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned.
Ugliness is more inventive than beauty. Beauty always follows certain camps. I think it's more amusing - ugliness - than beauty.
Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country
Being a professional philosopher is, I would say, feeling natural to think about small and great problems. It is the only pleasure.
There are more people than you think who want to have a challenging experience, in which they are obliged to reflect about the past.
To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
Show not what has been done, but what can be. How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths.
If photography is to be likened to perception, this is not because the former is a natural process but because the latter is also coded.
I lacked the courage to investigate the weaknesses of the wicked, because I discovered they are the same as the weaknesses of the saintly.
I was a fervent Catholic, and I belonged to the national organizations, even becoming one of the national leaders, until the age of 21, 22.
Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.
The function of memory is not only to preserve, but also to throw away. If you remembered everything from your entire life, you would be sick.
You tell me these two were my parents, so now I know but it's a memory that you've given me. I'll remember the photo from now on, but not them.
Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said
Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion.
Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.
All of us were slowly losing that intellectual light that allows you always to tell the similar from the identical, the metaphorical from the real.
Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means.
The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.
[In my writing] I know that I have made a caricature out of [others' academic] theories [but] I think that caricatures are frequently good portraits.
Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types.
Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
That is a real attitude - to see everything as being meaningful, even the less important things, to prove something, even the greater problems of life.
When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
He had prepared his death much earlier, in his imagination, unaware that his imagination, more creative than he, was planning the reality of that death.
National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same.
If two things don't fit, but you believe both of them, thinking that somewhere, hidden, there must be a third thing that connects them, that's credulity.
A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.