top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Italian Authors
"There is no certainty; there is only adventure."
"Often the test of courage is not to die but to live."
"I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death."
"Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don't like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don't like it."
"After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?"
"Woman is the sun, an extraordinary creature, one that makes the imagination gallop."
"When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression."
"There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list."
"I abhor the supreme folly of those who blame the disciples of nature in defiance of those masters who were themselves her pupils."
"Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly."
"To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator."
"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."
"Sometimes big designers are afraid that people won't recognize them if they change that much."
"Think what a revolution it will be if we manage to get everyone to pay their taxes."
"He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices."
"In a novel, my feelings and sense of outrage can find a broader means of expression which would be more symbolic and applicable to many European countries."
"The history of mankind is the history of ideas."
"If the painter has clumsy hands, he will be apt to introduce them into his works, and so of any other part of his person, which may not happen to be so beautiful as it ought to be. He must, therefore, guard particularly against that self-love, or too good opinion of his own person, and study by every means to acquire the knowledge of what is most beautiful, and of his own defects, that he may adopt the one and avoid the other."
"We always have to blame our failures on somebody else, and dictatorships always need an external enemy to bind their followers together. As the man said, for every complex problem there's a simple solution, and it's wrong."
"This is certainly not the first case in which a merger approved in one place hasn't gone through in the other. There was a case last year where the merger between two EU companies was approved here and blocked in the U.S."
"The children whom nobody leads by the hand are the children who know they are children."
"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him."
"I know many beautiful people and their lives are just so terrible. They feel so uncomfortable with themselves. Being comfortable is not about what you look like, but how you feel."
"Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will."
"For me, music making is the most joyful activity possible, the most perfect expression of any emotion."
"Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible."
"The contribution of Islam to history and modern civilization is the product of the efforts of peoples of many races and tongues which came to accept its way of life."
"If I test the car for a year I can be quite competitive the next season."
"You have to channel the interpretation and performance into 100 people. And with the audience, the critics."
"I was thrown into the Parliament right away. From 1976 to 1978 I was concerned with the abortion issue, later on with that of divorce."
"And I don't say that we didn't expect it, but we were pleasantly surprised to see the generosity of their foreign policy; and the generosity of their foreign policy at that moment was expressed through the Marshall Plan."
bottom of page