I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

By nature, I am an experimentalist. I don't believe much in accomplishment.

I have a great love and respect for religion, great love and respect for atheism. What I hate is agnosticism, people who do not choose.

Friendship creates only the illusion of not being alone.

n Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Everything about me is a contradiction, and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There's a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them.