I am like a cartoon strip; I am like Donald Duck; everybody knows me in Italy.

It's me, it's my habit to perform live onstage every four, five years. In Italy, it's my habit.

Only comedians can talk about death, life, God and Virgin Mary. If I was a tragic actor, I couldn't allow myself. But with this accent I can do it. I can talk with death in person because I am a clown. Yes. And I am proud to be a clown - very much.

My mother and my father went to the cinema for the first time when I made my first movie in 1978.

Dante Alighieri was not only a Christian poet or a priest, he was a man. He was a real poet. We can understand that the goal of Divine Comedy is beauty. You don't need also to understand Italian or to know Italian, because when Dante's writing, when we recite Dante out loud, it explodes a cosmos of illumination like to recite music, a symphony.

The exquisite truth is to believe in something that maybe you know is a fiction, but you believe in it willingly.

Maybe sometimes I have been wrong with some movies. Anyway, I try to do my best.