“Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;”

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.

All creation is in the art of seeing.

Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.

You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.

Women react differently: a French woman who sees herself betrayed by her husband will kill his mistress; an Italian will kill her husband; a Spaniard will kill both; and a German will kill herself.

Free speech isn’t dead in Germany and Italy, merely the speakers.

English dialogues are always just what you need and nothing more – like something out of Hemingway. In Italian and in French, dialogues are always theatrical, literary. You can do more with it.

I really enjoyed playing Vinny Vedecci, the Italian talk show host. He was the first character I ever came up with where I gave him a name and a way of dressing.

[When I’ll be old I see myself] as a world champion, on a big farm with an Italian-style, big family with a whole bunch of grandchildren. And the foundations for that I have already laid!

It is interesting to note that the best periods of Italian Horror films came out of the Sixties, when Italy was enjoying a carnival period of phenomenal optimism, and the shadowy side surfaced with all of its attendant dark, beautiful, baroque, catholic symbolism.