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.

Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.

Ignorance has its virtues; without it there'd be mighty little conversation.

I hated my father all my life but in his final days I forgave him for all the suffering he caused us. As you grow older, marry, and have children of you own, you learn and forget. I do not forget easily, but I do forgive.

At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, 'completes what nature left unfinished.'

Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.

I work when I feel like I can do something that pleases me, that I think I can give a little more than I've given up to yesterday.