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Quotes by Italian Authors
"Without Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion."
"Though I leave the house as little as possible, I have the impression that someone is disturbing my papers. More than once I have discovered that some pages were missing from my manuscripts. A few days afterward I would find the pages in their place again. But often I no longer recognize my manuscripts, as if I had forgotten what I had written, or as if overnight I were so changed that no longer recognized myself in the self of yesterday."
"I don't think there is too much art involved in what I do."
"Till now I have never shot a scene without taking account of what stands behind the actors because the relationship between people and their surroundings is of prime importance."
"The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn't know what war is except from television."
"Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?"
"Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses."
"Fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism."
"Disco does work better with black artists or players. They just feel it more."
"Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?"
"As to the question of elected or not elected, each member of the European Commission has been appointed jointly by the governments of the 15 member states, and undergone individual scrutiny and a vote of confidence from the European Parliament."
"Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid."
"I don't know whether these people are going to find themselves, but as they live their lives they have no choice but to face up to the image others have of them. They're forced to look at themselves in a mirror, and they often manage to glimpse something of themselves."
"I am known for a life spent in the struggle for freedom, and freedom includes the freedom of religion."
"Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell."
"The two great cultural and political currents of Italy have always only been concerned with the masses."
"I was on leave from local and regional politics, as long as I was a Minister."
"Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind which binds the passion."
"The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand."
"No press conference announcing a last film. I'd just steal away. Best way because, if by chance after two or three years something interesting comes up, I would not - like Sinatra - have to say: "Well, I've thought it over and decided to come back.""
"We have the 2004 M1 here for reference, which is useful. It worked well here last year; we won the race and always did fast lap times so it will be interesting to compare it to the new bike and it will help us to understand which parts have improved."
"Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning."
"Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry."
"The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities."
"On a group of theories one can found a school; but on a group of values one can found a culture, a civilization, a new way of living together among men."
"It is extraordinary to have time to again study Le nozze di Figaro and discover new things."
"Great passions, my dear, don't exist: they're liars fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while."
"The sincere friends of this world are as ship lights in the stormiest of nights."
"There are some centuries which - apart from everything else - in the art and other disciplines presume to remake everything because they know how to make nothing."
"No one is so completely disenchanted with the world, or knows it so thoroughly, or is so utterly disgusted with it, that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it."
"When I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises."
"Women have not yet realized the cowardice that resides, for if they should decide to do so, they would be able to fight you until death; and to prove that I speak the truth, amongst so many women, I will be the first to act, setting an example for them to follow."
"Think how many blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretions of other people."
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