When I first saw a Fellini movie, I came out of the movie theatre and decided to become a lawyer! I thought to myself, it's impossible to make something so beautiful!

My duty is to try to reach beauty. Cinema is emotion. When you laugh you cry.

Dante Alighieri has the most glorious imagination of modern poetry. So it's talking about us, it's concerning us. Everything in it conveys sentiment, emotions. He is really the greatest poet ever. So I am really very proud to present the shining pearl of Italian culture around the world.

There is nothing more beautiful in the world, enough to lose one's head. A sunset with a long nose, a starry sky that lies, a river searching for its father, a beautiful blue forest. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it's very mean, generous, magical, universal, a picture of freedom, of unrestrained desire to live, of pain and joy - a joy so powerful and sweet that it restores the souls in every spot on earth. The story of Pinocchio - nothing more beautiful in the world.

To be in front of an audience and pretending, and to lie, this is the principle of acting.

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

In Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity.