"I learned very early that books are the best travel companions: they speak when you need them to, they keep quiet when you want silence. They keep you company without being intrusive. They give a great deal without asking for anything."

TIZIANO TERZANI

"You can read, read, read, which is the finest thing you can do in your youth: and little by little you will feel yourself grow richer inside, you will feel taking shape within you that special experience which is culture."

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

"Music is a moral law: it gives soul to the universe, wings to thought, a flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, an impulse to gaiety, and life to all things."

PLATO

"Music is the perfect type of art, because it can never reveal its ultimate secret."

OSCAR WILDE

"Music is perhaps the only example of what might have been – had the invention of language, the formation of words and the analysis of ideas never come about – the communication of souls."

MARCEL PROUST

"Irony is the sure eye that can catch the crooked, the absurd, the vain in existence."

SØREN KIERKEGAARD

"Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom."

ANATOLE FRANCE

"If you can't pick up on irony, try picking tomatoes."

MAFALDA

"Look at Nature from this meadow, look closely and listen to her. There, the cuckoo: in the trees so many little birds – who knows what they are? – with their cries and their chirping, crickets in the grass, the wind passing through the leaves. A great concert that lives a life of its own, completely indifferent, detached from whatever happens... The ants go on walking, the birds sing to their god, the wind blows."

Tiziano Terzani – from a conversation with his son Folco

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"All of us are constantly losing many important things. Precious opportunities, possibilities, emotions that will never come again. Living means this too. But each of us, inside his own head – yes, I imagine it is inside the head – has a small room where he can keep all these things in the form of memories. Rather like the rooms of a library, with all those shelves. And in order to find our way through our own spirit with any confidence, we have to keep the archive of that room in order: go on compiling index cards, do the cleaning, let in fresh air, change the water in the flowers. In other words, you will live for ever in your own personal library."

HARUKI MURAKAMI, Kafka on the Shore

"Painting is a blind man's profession: he paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen."

Pablo Picasso