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Quotes by Italian Authors
"God has given a great deal to man, but man would like something from man."
"There are people who help you in life. I've been given a helping hand, and that's why I feel it's my duty to help younger artists."
"I've been very lucky in my long life. On three continents, in diverse cultures, through happy moments, not-so-happy moments, and moments as marvelous as this one, I've had the privilege of working with the cinema's greatest masters."
"You seldom get that in film where you're lucky if you get any say at all in the final cut."
"The moment you give up your principles, and your values, you are dead, your culture is dead, your civilization is dead. Period."
"It would be very easy for us to do a collection that everybody would like and not criticize. But criticism is a part of life. You have to take it."
"For, verily, great love springs from great knowledge of the beloved object, and if you little know it, you will be able to love it only little or not at all."
"Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient."
"That wish to enter into an elusive element which had urged Cosimo into the trees, was still working now inside him unsatisfied, making him long for a more intimate link, a relationship which would bind him to each leaf and twig and feather and flutter."
"Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside."
"Spiritual beings, either from the beginning or soon thereafter, become what they are to be for ever and ever."
"It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!"
"After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?"
"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language."
"To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator."
"The rivalry is with ourself. I try to be better than is possible. I fight against myself, not against the other."
"The proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words."
"Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement."
"Censorship is advertising paid by the government."
"I am now concerned with women's issues in a different way: women from Afghanistan, from Cambodia."
"I adopt a very simple approach. I observe and reflect real life and ordinary people and sooner or later that raises a laugh."
"The Templars' mental confusion makes them indecipherable. That's why so many people venerate them."
"Every artistic expression is either influenced by or adds something to politics."
"I think, first of all, you need to love what you're doing, and then this helps in the comedian for its part in everything-but the moment you enjoy what you're doing, you try to express yourself, to find your way, and every time is different, of course."
"The most important basis of any novel is wanting to be someone else, and this means creating a character."
"Although Dorothy in Blue Velvet was humiliated and hurt by men, basically I could react to how she felt."
"Never fit a dress to the body but train the body to fit the dress."
"Klopstock was questioned regarding the meaning of a passage in his poem. He replied, 'God and I both knew what it meant once; now God alone knows.'"
"An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things."
"When I see a film I've finished, it's like another person made it. Like another mind."
"But we did the Pink Panther not in Hollywood, in Italy."
"As for the level of spectacle of the two disciplines, I leave it to the people who watch the races to comment."
"Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears."
"It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman."
"Glory is a heavy burden, a murdering poison, and to bear it is an art. And to have that art is rare."
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