“Without my mother’s ambition, her drive, I doubt that on my own I would have pushed myself out of Pozzuoli and into the frightening world that was faraway Rome.”

Success, I would find out, is interior. It has to do with self-fulfillment and the joy of living.

It’s necessary to have an energy that carries you forward. You need the will to live, to have a great curiosity. To look for the best in life, to find new interests.

There’s no pleasure in working if you don’t do the things you want to do.

I think the quality of sexiness comes from within.

I don’t like to go in places where women talk and gossip. The atmosphere I don’t like, even though you can sometimes meet nice people. For me, it’s a waste of time.

If you don’t have the roots somewhere, it’s very difficult for people to work with you. Because you are a different person from them. They don’t know you, really. They don’t know how you feel.

Be honest about what you can get. To make a sacrifice and to get what you want you need to be very certain. In other words: always think about your objective, have a clear goal and commit to it from the heart.

I have never judged myself by other people’s standards. I have always expected a great deal of myself, and if I fail, I fail myself.

Believe me, it is actions that count.

Sex is like washing your face – just something you do because you have to. Sex without love is absolutely ridiculous. Sex follows love, it never precedes it.

Though poor and anxious to work, I refused to alter anything. They would take me as I looked or not at all. Eventually I profited by looking like myself and not like what was fashionable years ago with certain film technicians in Rome.

Where youthful beauty is unconscious, mature beauty is knowing and sophisticated.

My philosophy is that it’s better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe and not to explore at all.

When I’m walking along in the street, I always feel that around the corner, there is something wonderful waiting for me. That’s my attitude.

The mirror of your health is your skin. If you drink, it shows in your face; if you eat the wrong foods, you have pimples. If you take care of your food and you lead a healthy life, your skin will look wonderful.

I’d much rather eat pasta and drink wine than be a size 0.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

My goal is to drop 10 projects in 2013. All albums. I gotta do it. I know the 10 projects I want to drop.

You are not your bank account, or your ambitiousness. You’re not the cold clay lump with a big belly you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are spirit, you are love.

The idea of putting out an album is quite exciting because it’s sharing your creativity with people. There’s no ambition to be famous. I couldn’t care less about that.

From a very young age I had an ambition to be a musician, and to do that professionally. That’s what I pursued until I was about 20, playing in bands that were taken pretty seriously at that stage.

The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

The best job a man could have would be a chef. They’d understand the long hours I work and the drive and ambition it takes to succeed.