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Quotes by Italian Authors
"Italy have plenty of high-quality players. Newcomers need time to get adjusted to the set-up and the system of play. I'm very young, and although I think I have shown good quality in my international games, I realise that there are plenty of others competing for places."
"After all, the fundamental question of philosophy (like that of psychoanalysis) is the same as the question of the detective novel: who is guilty?"
"A lot of the advertisement is done by saying: first of all, have a complex about who you are."
"All the stories I would like to write persecute me. When I am in my chamber, it seems as if they are all around me, like little devils, and while one tugs at my ear, another tweaks my nose, and each says to me, 'Sir, write me, I am beautiful."
"When I was a boy, unconsciously, spontaneously I learned the art of telling ironic stories."
"These scenes deal with what happened before Hannibal Lecter was captured for the first time."
"Moral science is better occupied when treating of friendship than of justice."
"After this, I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about, and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper."
"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."
"The link between my experience as an entrepreneur and that of a politician is all in one word: freedom."
"He turns not back who is bound to a star."
"We thought the church had withdrawn from interfering in Italian politics... but instead there is a terrible resurgence. These are ugly signs for freedom of expression."
"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."
"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."
"We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi."
"Nobility of spirit has more to do with simplicity than ostentation, wisdom rather than wealth, commitment rather than ambition."
"Semiotics is a general theory of all existing languages... all forms of communication - visual, tactile, and so on... There is general semiotics, which is a philosophical approach to this field, and then there are many specific semiotics."
"National identity is the last bastion of the dispossessed. But the meaning of identity is now based on hatred, on hatred for those who are not the same."
"Well, Diotallevi and I are planning a reform in higher education. A School of Comparative Irrelevance, where useless or impossibe courses are given. The school's aim is to turn out scholars capable of endlessly increasing the number of unnecessary subjects."
"After so many years even the fire of passion dies, and with it what was believed the light of the truth. Who of us is able to say now whether Hector or Achilles was right, Agamemnon or Priam, when they fought over the beauty of a woman who is now dust and ashes?"
"No, I'm happy to go on living the life I've chosen. I'm a university teacher and I like my job."
"We are a pluralist civilisation because we allow mosques to be built in our countries, and we are not going to stop simply because Christian missionaries are thrown into prison in Kabul. If we did so, we, too, would become Taliban."
"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."
"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."
"Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known."
"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."
"The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?"
"Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do."
"To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are."
"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."
"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."
"That which can be lost cannot be deemed riches. Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us. Hold property and external riches with fear; they often leave their possessor scorned and mocked at for having lost them."
"But chance has a taste for conspiracy."
"The nature of peoples is first crude, then severe, then benign, then delicate, finally dissolute."
"Always I pay. Always I pay. How do you know Gelli? What do you want? How much do you want?"
"If the audience never understands the plot, it can be counted on to be attentive to the very end."
"There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction, but I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation."
"But each time I seemed to be climbing into a roller coaster and finding myself coming through the downhill run with that sort of dazed feeling that we all know."
"People with lots of doubts sometimes find life more oppressive and exhausting than others, but they're more energetic - they aren't robots."
"People's attitudes about sex aren't healthy anywhere, except maybe in those tribes where they go around naked."
"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."
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