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Quotes by Italian Authors
"Nobody taught Picasso how to paint - he learned for himself. And nobody can teach you to be a producer. You can learn the mechanics, but you can't learn what's right about a script or a director or an actor. That comes from instinct and intuition. It comes from inside you."
"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else."
"The link between my experience as an entrepreneur and that of a politician is all in one word: freedom."
"You have to be able to enthral and persuade at the same time."
"No, I'm happy to go on living the life I've chosen. I'm a university teacher and I like my job."
"Reference to the territory and total disregard for the nationality of the companies is of course the best guarantee that competition assessment remain just that and doesn't get affected by trade or other considerations."
"Good sense travels on the well-worn paths; genius, never. And that is why the crowd, not altogether without reason, is so ready to treat great men as lunatics."
"I am still against any kind of censorship. It's a subject in my life that has been very important."
"People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots."
"I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life."
"Drafting a constitution is only the first step. The constitution has to be granted legitimacy by open discussion and a fair, representative referendum."
"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it then is discovered; because the truth that can come from my pen is like a shard that has been chipped from a great boulder by a violent impact, then flung far away; because there is no certitude outside falsification."
"Ah, no, far be from me a thought which I loathe like poison."
"My job is to look at what politics is doing, not be a politician myself."
"I'm Valentino Rossi. And I want to be a person, not an icon."
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Tell the others right away, 'No, I don't want to watch TV! I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!"
"It's a big, big advantage because understanding what changes we might make takes time and it takes time to work out settings and to understand everything about the new machine."
"It is at least 10 times more difficult to get a good synthesiser sound than on an acoustic instrument."
"Literature is my life of course, but from an ontological point of view. From an existential point of view, I like being a teacher."
"Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one."
"The farewell between Hitler and Mussolini at the station was very affectionate. Both men were moved."
"Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire nation, or the entire human race."
"The initial motivation of the experiment which led to this discovery was a subconscious feeling for the inexhaustible wealth of nature, a wealth that goes far beyond the imagination of man."
"When you have a foreign invasion - in this case by the Indonesian army - writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression."
"A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness."
"If you lived in a provincial town like Torre Annunziata, where there was nothing to do in the evening but go to the movies with your friends, the cinema was a world of fantasy. I had always been in love with it."
"All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks."
"I did not know then what Brother William was seeking, and to tell the truth, I still do not know today, and I presume he himself did not know, moved as he was solely by the desire for truth, and by the suspicion - which I could see he always harbored - that the truth was not what was appearing to him at any given moment."
"Fascism was a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place."
"The Geometer has the special privilege to carry out, by abstraction, all constructions by means of the intellect. Who, then, would wish to prevent me from freely considering figures hanging on a balance imagined to be at an infinite distance beyond the confines of the world?"
"But I don't think I have any particular talent for prediction, because when you have three or four elements in hand, you don't have to be a genius to reach certain conclusions."
"I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism."
"When we grow old, there can only be one regret - not to have given enough of ourselves."
"Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them."
"To conquer the command of the air means victory; to be beaten in the air means defeat and acceptance of whatever terms the enemy may be pleased to impose."
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