“Luxury is the income tax of vanity. But it is so pleasant.”

In a meat-eating world, wearing leather for shoes and clothes and even handbags, the discussion of fur is childish.

The elegance is as physical, as moral quality that has nothing common with the clothing. You can see a countrywoman more elegant than one so called elegant woman.

Change is the healthiest way to survive.

No one wants to see curvy women.

I love classic beauty. It’s an idea of beauty with no standard.

I’ve survived quite a few generations. That’s because I never lost my enthusiasm. I wake up every morning like on Christmas Day, waiting for the gifts.

It’s up to you to make everyday as perfect as possible. It’s a question of will and discipline.

People who say that yesterday was better than today are ultimately devaluing their own existence.

You have to like the present; if not your life becomes secondhand, if you think it was better before. Or that it will be better in the future.

Life is not a beauty contest, some [ugly people] are great. What I hate is nasty, ugly people… the worst is ugly, short men. Women can be short, but for men it is impossible. It is something that they will not forgive in life… they are mean and they want to kill you.

If you’re not ready to do a non-stop dialogue with fashion, you should do another job.

I don’t like standard beauty – there is no beauty without strangeness.

I only know how to play one role: me.

When I was 14, I wanted to smoke because my mother smoked like mad. I wanted to smoke to look grown-up. But my mother said: ‘You shouldn’t smoke. Your hands are not that beautiful and that shows when you smoke.

Be politically correct, but please don’t bother other people with conversation about being politically correct, because that’s the end of everything. You want to create boredom? Be politically correct in your conversation.

I think tattoos are horrible. It’s like living in a Pucci dress full-time.

It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not; with a painted ceiling whereon pink griffins and blue amorini sport in a forest of yellow violins and bassoons.

The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries.

It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and, close below, Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.

Nothing could be more pleasant than to live in solitude, enjoy the spectacle of nature, and occasionally read some book.

The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

The world is not the most pleasant place. Eventually, your parents leave you and nobody is going to go out of their way to protect you unconditionally.

In Bali life is a rhythmic, patterned unreality of pleasant, significant movement, centered in one’s own body to which all emotions long ago withdrew.

Manners, really good ones, make it possible to live with almost anyone, gracefully and pleasantly.