Italian Screenwriter Quotes

Michelangelo Antonioni

Sergio Leone

Bernardo Bertolucci

Roberto Rossellini

Cesare Zavattini

Andrea Camilleri

Susanna Tamaro

I am showing the Old West as it really was. Cinema takes violence from life. Not the other way around. Americans treat Westerns with too much rhetoric.

The struggle for life is not only the material and economic one. Comfort is no protection from anxiety.

Michelangelo Antonioni

If New York is the Big Apple, tonight Hollywood is the Big Nipple.

Bernardo Bertolucci

But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average at least once every four sentences? Maybe, though the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old - for every now and then one must, yes, look reality in the eye and call things by their proper names - we feel more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us.

Andrea Camilleri

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

Roberto Rossellini

On the principles of Italian neo-realism:

I believe in imagination, but I have more faith in reality, in people. I am not interested in prearranged encounters, in the drama of things that happen to come together.

Cesare Zavattini

Today I live on an island, in a house that is sad, hard, severe, that I built for myself, solitary on a sheer rock over the sea: a house that is the spectre, the secret image of prison. The image of my nostalgia. Maybe I never desired, not even then, to escape from jail. Man is not meant to live freely in freedom, but to be free inside a prison.

Curzio Malaparte

To make mistakes is natural, but to go to one's grave without having understood them is to make life a pointless exercise.