“Serenely full, the epicure would say,
Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today.”

“After 1994, we did many things. We had Fiuggi, there was a confrontation. I'd say that today one cannot say it for sure. Today, I would not say it again [that Mussolini was the greatest political leader of the century. ]”

“I cannot come to be fully human unless I have received myself as a gift and accepted myself as a gift of somebody who has, as we say today, distorted me the way you distorted me by loving me.”

“And she would say, "Today you believe in God?" And he would say, "Today I believe in love".”

“If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed.”

“Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.”

“And then she (Brooke Sheilds) says the ill-fated words "You have to put this in your act". And I said "What, I would never!"”

“It is an immortal masterpiece. Anybody and everybody today would, I should say, give the rest of their lives to have written it. Anyway I would.”

“Away with those perfumes that do me harm!
I hate them, nurse, and would you have me feel
Their drunken vapors make my senses reel?”

“I would request that my body in death be buried not cremated, so that the energy content contained within it gets returned to the earth, so that flora and fauna can dine upon it, just as I have dined upon flora and fauna during my lifetime”