1. Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.




2. When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.

3. I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.

4. I think the quality of sexiness comes from within. It is something that is in you or it isn't and it really doesn't have much to do with breasts or thighs or the pout of your lips.

5. A woman's dress should be like a barbed-wire fence: serving its purpose without obstructing the view.


6. There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.

7. Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.

8. Sex appeal is fifty percent what you've got and fifty percent what people think you've got.

9. If you haven't cried, your eyes can't be beautiful.

10. 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.

11. Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself. That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go so much further than people with vastly superior talent.


12. Spaghetti can be eaten most successfully if you inhale it like a vacuum cleaner.

13. After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It's better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.

14. The facts of life are that a child who has seen war cannot be compared with a child who doesn't know what war is except from television.

15. I'm a giraffe. I even walk like a giraffe with a long neck and legs. It's a pretty dumb animal, mind you.

16. I am against all war.

17. It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.

18. No press conference announcing a last film. I'd just steal away. Best way because, if by chance after two or three years something interesting comes up, I would not - like Sinatra - have to say: "Well, I've thought it over and decided to come back."

19. The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.

20. You have to be born a sex symbol. You don't become one. If you're born with it, you'll have it even when you're 100 years old.

21. It's a mistake to think that once you're done with school you need never learn anything new.

22. I was so skinny, they gave me the nickname stechetto - the stick. I was tall, thin, ugly and dark like an Arab girl. I looked strange. All eyes. No flesh on my bones.

23. The word "Action!" frees me - the transformation is something I cannot explain - too much analysis might destroy it.

24. I want everything - all of it.

25. I can't bear being seen naked. I'm not exactly a tiny woman.

26. Nothing makes a woman more beautiful than the belief that she is beautiful.

27. When the lights went down and I was alone with Rita or Linda or Tyrone, I was suffused with the feeling that that's what I was put on earth to do, to act, to express myself, to let out whatever feelings I had inside.

28. It is very important for an actor or actress to look around at everything and everyone and never forget about real life.

29. When I was a child, fear was common to my life-fear of having nothing to eat, fear of the other children taunting me at school because I was illegitimate, and particularly fear of the big bombers appearing overhead and dropping their lethal bursts from the sky.

30. He (Tyrone Power) was the god of my adolescence.

31. I was not intrigued with the accoutrements of success and fame, the furs, jewels, expensive automobiles and mansions…. I can assure you that these things were not on my mind when I sat spellbound in that Pozzuoli movie house. It was what these performers on the screen were doing, not what they received for doing it.

32. If you are a professional actor who has pride in his work, then the judgment of your peers should be important to you. I treasure each and every award I have ever received-and my Oscar is in a place of honor.

33. 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.

34. I was not interested in what I could bring to myself by being an actress, but in what I could bring out of myself.

35. When I heard the names of my co-stars I almost passed out…. I, little Sofia Scicolone, was to play opposite two of those romantic figures of my Pozzuoli dreams, in an English-speaking, multi-million dollar spectacle film.



36. Once I put myself into a thing, I do my utmost, my very, very best.

37. I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. 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.

38. For me, it is good to be vulnerable. It makes me nice…weak sometimes, but in a good way, not a tragic way.

39. To prepare for the part (in Two Women), I opened the sluices of my memory, letting the bombing raids, the nights in the tunnel, the killings, the rapes and starvation and inhumanity wash back over me. I particularly concentrated on my mother as I remembered her during the war, her fears, connivances and sacrifices, and especially the way she fiercely protected us against the scourges of the war.

40. When I perform with Marcello (Mastroianni), I am the full moon. And he is the ring around me.

41. 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.

42. Being beautiful can never hurt, but you have to have more. You have to sparkle, you have to be fun, you have to make your brain work if you have one.

43. After the (1999) Oscars, I received so much mail and so many compliments from friends. It's a wonderful feeling that people like you and have such esteem for you. I'm enchanted that people talk to me this way. It's like winning the lottery.

44. Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, and yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

45. You give but little when you give of your possessions.
It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

46. It is well to give when asked but it is better to give unasked, through understanding.

47. Life is indeed darkness save when there is urge, and all urge is blind save when there is knowledge, and all knowledge is vain save when there is work, and all work is empty save when there is love.

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