“I became a man by becoming a public man.”

“And if you became man, what else could you become?”

“Man has been trained in the same way as animals. He has become an author, as they became beasts of burden.”

“God became a man, granted. The devil became a woman.”

“What is bigger than an elephant? But this also is become man's plaything, and a spectacle at public solemnities; and it learns to skip, dance, and kneel.”

“Poetry has ceased to be a public art and has become, as Whitehead said of religion, "What man does with his aloneness."”

“Every morning I speak to my conscience and the dialogue calms me down. I look at the country, read the newspaper, and think: 'All is becoming a reality little by little, piece by piece'. To be truthful, I should have had the copyright to it. Justice, TV, public order. I wrote about this 30 years ago…. Berlusconi is an extraordinary man, a man of action. This is what Italy needs: not a man of words, but a man of action.”

“To be in love is to be like a public man. Because the public man has no privacy. So are you whenever you fall in love!”

“Why not give up the pain, the injury, the slow and terminal? He worried and fretted how cool his skin had become. He understood how at the end a freezing man felt alive with heat and a drowned man could breathe and a burning man became cold and shivered and then died.”

“Deep at the dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man's relish is apt to be the black man's gall.”