Italian Quotes - Page 4

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

I'm very proud of being Italian-American, but people don't realize that the mafia is just this aberration. The real community is built on the working man, the guy who's the cop, the fireman, the truck driver, the bus driver.

Hitler decided that Mussolini must be freed from the Italian Partisans because Benito was his friend and had acted in good faith.

I lived in Italy for a number of years and I was really digging around trying to get my hands dirty, trying to learn about Italian music. And what I ended up gravitating towards was this stuff from the '50s and '60s and maybe early '70s, where there were these incredibly talented pop singers that weren't using pop bands.

Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of the Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life.

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top; Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace. For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.

There are so many different kinds of people in America, with so many different boiling points, that we don't know how to fight with each other. The set piece that shapes and contains quarrels in homogeneous countries does not exist here. The Frenchman is an expert on the precise gradations of espèce de and the Italian knows exactly when to introduce the subject of his other's grave, but no American can be sure how or when another will react, so we zap each other with friendliness to neutralize potentially dangerous situations.

Italian-Americans are not the Mafia.

I was a mod when I was a kid. I'd be in Italian pencil-leg trousers with those bowling shoes you wear outside and a Fred Perry polo shirt with a V-neck sweater. It was like an Essex uniform - a very specific look.

Some princes, so as to hold securely the state, have disarmed their subjects, others have kept their subject towns distracted by factions...Our forefathers, and those who were reckoned wise, were accustomed to say that it was necessary to hold Pistoia [an Italian city] by factions and Pisa by fortress, and with this idea they fostered quarrels in some of their tributary towns so as to keep possession of them the more easily.

She wanted an Italian sports car - with the sport still in it.

What this White House really needs is a chief of staff who can read Machiavelli in the original Italian.

I came to think that nobody from England could draw American comic books, because they were clearly all done by this sort of Mafia, all these guys with Italian and Irish names who had the whole thing sewn up. It was actually seeing a comic book drawn by Barry Smith, who was about my age, and English.

Italy has changed. But Rome is Rome.

I prefer more spicy food to your Italian to be fair.

You catch any white man off guard in here right now, you catch him off guard and ask him what he is, he doesn't say he's an American. He either tells you he's Irish, or he's Italian, or he's German, if you catch him off guard and he doesn't know what you're up to. And even though he was born here, he'll tell you he's Italian. Well, if he's Italian, you and I are African even though we were born here.

At one point Trudeau mentioned to me that the National Gallery wanted to buy a masterpiece by the great Italian painter Lotto, and it needed a million dollars from the Treasury Board. "Is that Lotto-Quebec or Lotto-Canada?" I joked, but I got the message, and the National Gallery got the painting.

I've got a friend who is half-Jewish and half-Italian. If he can't buy it wholesale, he steals it!

The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.

When I am walking in Central Park, I recognize the Italians. Because an Italian, even when he jogs, he's dressed perfect.

My grandma used to plant tomato seedlings in tin cans from tomato sauce & puree & crushed tomatoes she got from the Italian restaurant by her house, but she always soaked the labels off first. I don't want them to be anxious about the future, she said. It's not healthy.

My outlook on warfare is best illustrated by a cartoon I did some thirty-odd years ago of a soldier in an Italian foxhole reading about the Normandy invasion and observing to his buddy that: "The hell this ain't the most important hole in the world . I'm in it.

As an Italian-American, I have a special responsibility to be sensitive to ethnic stereotypes.

You try to come up with new ideas, but in the end, people just want to eat Italian food.

When I arrived in Beirut from Europe, I felt the oppressive, damp heat, saw the unkempt palm trees and smelt the Arabic coffee, the fruit stalls and the over-spiced meat. It was the beginning of the Orient. And when I flew back to Beirut from Iran, I could pick up the British papers, ask for a gin and tonic at any bar, choose a French, Italian, or German restaurant for dinner. It was the beginning of the West. All things to all people, the Lebanese rarely questioned their own identity.