"Any good parody takes a grain of truth and exaggerates it for the big screen. People ask me if I'm offended at all and I say not in the least."

“If there were no such creatures as minstrel-maidens, it would be necessary to invent them.”

“We who are alive at this moment are only an infinitesimal part of something that has existed for eternity and will continue when there is no longer anything to show that earth existed. Still, we must feel and believe that we are all.”

“That's great advertising when you can turn Chicago into a city you'd want to spend more than three hours in.”

Source : Jerry Della Femina (2010). “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harb: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War”, p.35, Simon and Schuster

“The triumph can't be had without the struggle.”

“A Frenchwoman, when double-crossed, will kill her rival; the Italian woman would rather kill her deceitful lover; the Englishwoman simply breaks off relations-but they all will console themselves with another man.”

“Making movies is like herding cats.”

Source : "The producers". Interview with Charlotte Higgins, www.theguardian.com. April 16, 2005.

“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”

“In the early 1990s, I briefly got involved in Italian politics. But that intermezzo lasted just two years and had little success. I also found politics emotionally empty.”