All Quotes

"Gossip only lasts a few days, it dies down very quickly and the truth prevails once again."

"(About the reasons for her marriage to Milko Skofic) Well, there was a reason... I had a misadventure, like many women. There was a wretch who took advantage of me, a footballer from Lazio. He drugged me, I was a virgin... What was I going to report him for? In those days... Now he's dead. I tried to convince myself that nothing had happened, but you don't forget something like that. Afterwards, I got together with Milko. It wasn't that he wanted to marry me, I wanted to, to have a normal life, I felt ruined... It was certainly a marriage of convenience on his part. He played tennis and counted money, that's all he did. When it became legal to do so, I divorced him."

"[Which recognition do you value most?] The four stamps that San Marino had printed with my face on them. It's a privilege reserved for kings and queens."

"I wasn't passionate about cinema. I did it to help my family. We were displaced in Rome and needed to eat. Those were the years when actors were picked up off the street. Some people stopped me as I was leaving school and asked me if I wanted to be in films, and I said no, that I wasn't interested. Then they offered me a thousand lire a day, and that convinced me to become an actress."

"(About acting) I think a little training is good, but I also believe that instinct is what wins out."

"There is less emotion in cinema today. There are stories that unfold in a setting of absolute futurism, and when I see them, I change the channel. In Italian cinema, when it was number one in the world, and that's what I was lucky enough to do, there was more emotion. People would watch a film and identify with it, they would cry and get emotional. There was something in the films that touched our emotions."

"A beautiful woman, even at seventy, is a beautiful woman, damn it, and if she has talent, you have to admit it, not despise the beautiful woman."

"What makes me angry is that they have always tried to take something away from women, and this continues today. It is always men who move forward and women who are always one step behind, and this is not fair. We should have a little equality."

"(About Marilyn Monroe) When we met, the first thing she told me was that they called her the American Gina Lollobrigida. She was surprisingly modest, and I immediately liked her."

"She makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple."

"Well, you know, foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Someone said that. I could never figure out what the provenance was."

"The fears are coming out now because she is the one seated. After the May 2010 elections, the political landscape will change. Practical reality, the term ‘balimbing,’ Arroyo's supporters will also change. And it's a reality. That's not far-fetched. It's reality."

"the farmer takes Jill down the well & all the king's horses & all the king's men can't put that baby together again crooked man crooked man pumpkin eater childhood stealer."

"death is where jimi hendrix is, where our revolution ended up."

"There has always been something wrong wif the tesses. The tesses paint a picture of me wif no brain. The tesses paint a picture of me an' my muver—my whole family, we more than dumb, we invisible."

""I'm tired," I says. She says, "I know you are, but you can't stop now Precious, you gotta push." And I do."

"At the you were, of course, first taught to draw. You experienced the pleasure of the , , the , cartridge and , and how to slice off enough of the latter without losing the lot. You were taught about the right pencil and how to rub down ; and how to rub out."

"The Italians who crossed the by invitation brought with them a technical scenic ability, the s being as well equipped as the ers themselves. Of the former, was probably the greatest. He was a native of , made his name in Rome, and attracted the attention of von Liechtenstein, for whom he built . He appears to have carried out little garden design, but his influence on detail was profound. ... Another architect was , who built the Salesian Nunnery and altered the . Both are as well designed as anything in Austria. Of the scenic designers the working in were the most famous. In Vienna designed theatrical scenery, the monument in the , and the Imperial palace of Favorita (now the ). Of architectural draughtsmen the best was . In the train of the Italians came the craftsmen, men who set a standard of technique as high as at any time."

"Away from her prison work, divided her time between London and , where she and her husband raised two adopted daughters, Isabella and Esther, at their home, , near . There, they commissioned a celebrated from Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1969, which many consider his finest work."

"You're not bad [Cristiano De André], you're just stupid!"

"Geoffrey Jellicoe was one of the century's greatest landscape architects. His contribution to landscape design — a discipline he credited above building design as the "Mother of all Arts" — has been described as equal to that of one of his great heroes, the 18th-century gardener . Among Jellicoe's triumphs are the grounds of at , in , near , public gardens at and the at , together with many small private commissions."

"If in that moment I was, I will definitely learn and grow from that, na I acknowledge my actions and I will be better. If I am in a situation like that again in the future, I will rethink, I will take a breath before I decide to make that action again and resolve it in a different way."

"This same norm of Apostolic doctrine is firmly maintained by his (Peter's) successors, of him to whom the Lord entrusted the care of the entire flock of sheep, to whom He promised not to leave him until the end of time."

"Benedetto Croce said that everyone writes poetry until the age of eighteen. From the age of eighteen onwards, two categories of people continue to write poetry: poets and idiots. So, as a precaution, I would prefer to consider myself a singer-songwriter."

"There are those who are touched by faith and those who merely cultivate the virtue of hope [...], the God in whom, despite everything, I continue to hope, is an entity above the parties, above the factions."

"Do they complain about gypsies? Look at them going around begging for votes: but they don't go on foot, they have buses that look like spaceships, trains, aeroplanes: and look at them when they stop for lunch or dinner: they know how to eat with a knife and fork, and with a knife and fork they will eat your savings. Italy belongs to a hundred men, but are we sure that these hundred men belong to Italy?"

"Singing alone with my guitar would give me the same feeling as getting down on all fours in the De Ferrari fountain at midday."

"Genoa is also the friends who live far away and watch you grow up and grow old, for example the pescuèi who, just like in Il pescatore, have faces furrowed with wrinkles that look like smiles, and whatever you confide in them, they already know from the sea."

"During the war, I was displaced to Piedmont, and for me, Genoa was a myth, something extraordinary. When I saw it for the first time at the age of five, I immediately fell in love with it, tremendously, and at the first match of my life, Genoa-Sampierdarenese, I immediately married the team that bore the name of my city. It was a love that I never betrayed, the most solid of my life, which was full of constant contradictions."

"When I go out in public, I'm very afraid of being criticised. Controlling your facial muscles, for example, which should be an actor's job, is a specific thing, it's a precise skill. Putting my face in front of my songs annoyed me first of all because it seemed to me that my songs remained behind my face, whose muscles I couldn't control, and secondly, the fact that I couldn't control them also worried me. In the sense that I didn't consider myself an actor at all, that is, a person suited to showing his face in a certain way. Maybe I say “you sleep buried in a field of wheat” and I'm laughing, but I don't realise it because I'm not used to acting out what I'm saying. Because I wrote that song, I didn't have to act it out. I'm not capable of acting. I consider myself, in a way, someone who can also make music to accompany lyrics. I consider myself a guitar player. I don't go beyond that. I don't think I'm the ideal interpreter of my songs. Because to be an interpreter, you have to be something different. I don't think I'm an interpreter, because you always have to have the face you had when you wrote the verse. The face you had when you felt it. And it's not like I write verses in front of the mirror. In fact, I don't like myself that much."

"After ten years of slapping each other, you either become friends or you kill each other."

"I tried in every way to be a man. I could have expressed myself, for example, through flower cultivation if I had lived in Albenga, or through cattle breeding if they hadn't secretly sold me a farm that my parents owned in 1954. I happened to become a singer-songwriter. Becoming an artist, in a way, prevents you from becoming a man in the normal way. So I believe that at a certain point in your life, you have to make up for the time you lost being an artist in order to try to become a man."

"For me, Genoa is like a mother, it's where I learned to live."

"What struck me about the world of the carruggi was the habit of suffering and therefore solidarity. They were supportive on any occasion, because they were the underclass, not even a specific class that could be grasped by the traditional political parties. It was a world that defended itself to some extent from the state, and so I wallowed in it. I already had precise political ideas, derived from Brassens, whom I listened to from morning to night, thanks to the records my father brought me from France, and he described this world, these marginalised characters that I then found in Genoa."

"I have no doubt about the total character that the struggle for the independence of Sardinia can take on if we work in a truly revolutionary way. Because the anti-colonial liberation struggle of a people is exemplary for all colonised peoples, indeed for all the exploited peoples of the world... In Nuoro, important work has begun, I believe, because it can have an impact on society... The signs should not be underestimated, because a new reality is emerging today in Sardinia with the need to liberate the masses and give them a national and international voice. Since I cannot help but say that I am against small and large power games, against bottlenecks and delays that are artfully manoeuvred, I am firmly convinced that the Sardinian knot will certainly not be untangled by the simple and imperturbable methods of changing the presidency of the Palace. Much more is needed! It is the people who must change things. Sardinia, with its own language, history and territory, has the right to be recognised as a nation."

"What I think is useful is to have the government as close to me as possible and the state, if it really can't be avoided, as far away from my balls as possible."

"Our world is divided into winners and losers, where the former number three and the latter three billion. How can we be optimistic?"

"I sang imitating Modugno, and besides, how could one not be influenced by him?"

"Genoa is a democratic and liberal city. It is tolerant because it has always done business with everyone regardless of language, customs, clothing or skin colour."

"Genoa [...] has always been this way [multiracial] since the Middle Ages. I would say like Sarajevo. Five centuries ago, no one paid any attention if someone wore a turban. Genoa was born and grew up respecting different religions. There has never been a ghetto. The Church had little power, and neither did the Inquisition. There was never a torture chamber in the Doge's Palace. I don't think it was so much an Enlightenment vocation as the need to open up to everyone for commercial interests. Are the carugi full of Moroccans? This is nothing new for Genoa."

"This is a song that dates back to 1962, where I show that I have always had, both as a young man and as an old man, very few ideas, but on the other hand, they are fixed. In the sense that in this song I express what I have always thought: that there is very little merit in virtue and very little blame in error. Also because, despite my fifty-eight years, I have not yet managed to understand exactly what virtue is and what error is, because we only need to move to a different latitude to see how values become disvalues and vice versa. Not to mention moving through time: there were morals in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that are no longer recognised today. Today we complain: I see that there is great torment over the loss of values. We need to wait and see how they develop over time. I don't think that young people today have no values; they certainly have values that we have not yet managed to understand properly, because we are too attached to our own."

"Riccardo Mannerini was another great friend of mine. He was almost blind because when he was sailing on a Costa ship, a boiler exploded in his face. He committed suicide many years later, without ever receiving any compensation. He had bad experiences with the law because he was a true libertarian, so when someone wanted by the police knocked on his door, he would hide them in his house. He would even treat their wounds and remove the bullets from their bodies. We wrote Cantico dei Drogati (Song of the Drug Addicts) together, which for me, as someone who was totally addicted to alcohol, had a liberating, cathartic value. However, the text did not scare me; on the contrary, I was pleased with it. It is a common reaction among drug addicts to take pleasure in the fact that they are taking drugs. I took pleasure in drinking, partly because alcohol allowed my imagination to run wild."

"I've never seen a musician communicate with the audience like Luciano does."

"If a miraculous voice had not performed La canzone di Marinella in 1967, I would most likely have finished my law studies and become a solicitor. I thank Mina for stacking the deck in my favour and, above all, to the benefit of my virtual clients."

"Jesus of Nazareth [...] in my opinion, was and remains the greatest revolutionary of all time."

"From a quality of life perspective, apart from the devastating spectacle of the suburban areas, life in Sardinia is perhaps the best a man could wish for: twenty-four thousand kilometres of forests, countryside and coastline surrounded by a miraculous sea should coincide with what I would recommend to the good Lord to give us as Paradise. In my opinion, the Sardinians would make better decisions if they were independent within a European and Mediterranean community."

"For centuries, the people of Genoa have had a special relationship with French culture, both in music, as in the case of the chansonnier, and in cabinetmaking, with the Genoese Baroque style."

"Mannerini taught me that being intelligent doesn't mean accumulating knowledge, but rather selecting it once it has been accumulated, trying to separate the useful from the useless. [...] I practically learned this ability to analyse and observe from him. He also influenced me politically, reinforcing ideas I already had. He was certainly one of the most important figures in my life."

"Genoa is like a mother to me. It is where I learned to live. It gave birth to me and raised me until I was thirty-five years old: and that is no small thing, in fact, it is perhaps almost everything. Today, it seems to me that Genoa has the face of all the poor devils I met in its carruggi, the outcasts I would later find in Sardinia, the “graziose” of Via del Campo."

"What is loyalty, after all? It's nothing more than a big itch with a strict ban on scratching."