The court jester had the right to say the most outrageous things to the king. Everything was permitted during carnival, even the songs that the Roman legionnaires would sing, calling Julius Caesar "queen", alluding, in a very transparent way, to his real, or presumed, homosexual escapades.

Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear.

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake.

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

I write stories about conspiracies and paranoid characters while I am, in fact, a very skeptical person.

I'm always fascinated by losers. Also, in my "Foucault's Pendulum," the main characters, who are in a way losers, they are more interesting than the winners.