"I do not take any pleasure whatsoever in being a famous person."

"And I don't want to live anywhere where I am famous. It makes me very, very uncomfortable, because it conveys an advantage over people, and I don't like that."

"I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years."

"Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it to work around it."

"The tapestry of existence shows us that the purest joy is found in giving without expectation."

"It's obvious, but perhaps worth saying, that happiness has virtually nothing to do with the state of your intellect."

"It is the working man who is the happy man. It is the idle man who is the miserable man."

"It is really rare to find someone you really, really love and that you want to spend your life with and all that stuff that goes along with being married. I am one of those lucky people. And I think she feels that way too. So the romantic stuff is easy because you want them to be happy."