Roberto Benigni

“I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.”

“To be in front of an audience and pretending, and to lie, this is the principle of acting.”

“The most important thing is to continue to be yourself. The day after the Oscars, you have to get on with your life. To be honest and true to yourself.”

“My duty is to try to reach beauty. Cinema is emotion. When you laugh you cry.”

“Stanley Kubrick is one of the geniuses of this century.”

“Sometimes poetry, it is incomprehensible. But we need incomprehensible stuff! It is very healthy to talk about incomprehensible things! It is very healthy! We need it!”

“I would like to thank my parents in Vergaio, a little village in Italy. They gave me the biggest gift: poverty.”

“In Italy, the country where fascism was born, we have a particular relation with the Holocaust, but as a turning point in history it belongs to everybody in the world. It is a part of humanity.”

“'The Tiger And The Snow' is a beautiful movie. I am in love with this idea.”

“I am like a cartoon strip; I am like Donald Duck; everybody knows me in Italy.”

“The first movie I saw - and I don't know if it influenced me - was Ben Hur. We watched it outside in a corn field, and it ran backwards, so the first movie I ever saw was Ben Hur backwards.”

“My mother and my father went to the cinema for the first time when I made my first movie in 1978.”

“Maybe sometimes I have been wrong with some movies. Anyway, I try to do my best.”

“'The Divine Comedy' is very sophisticated but also very popular.”

“I think that sometimes only comedians can reach the peaks of tragedy.”

“The exquisite truth is to believe in something that maybe you know is a fiction, but you believe in it willingly.”

“It's me, it's my habit to perform live onstage every four, five years. In Italy, it's my habit.”

“Fellini and Bunuel changed my life for me, they are my favourites. If it is true that movies are dreams, both of them, Fellini and Bunuel were shooting in a dream way.”

“My father was a farmer and my mother was a farmer, but, my childhood was very good. I am very grateful for my childhood, because it was full of gladness and good humanity.”

“I'm a storyteller: the crux of the matter is to reach beauty, poetry; it doesn't matter if that is comedy or tragedy. They're the same if you reach the beauty.”