Talk:Sophia Loren

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• After the 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. (After the 1999 Acadamy Awards)

• Everything you see I owe to spaghetti.

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

• 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.

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

• I am against all war.

• I can't bear being seen naked. I'm not exactly a tiny woman. When Sophia Loren is naked, this is a lot of nakedness.

• I still like me, inside and out. Not in a vain way — I just feel good in my skin.

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

• Ignorance has its virtues; without it there'd be mighty little conversation.

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

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

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

• 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."

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• The most indispensable ingredient of all good home cooking: love, for those you are cooking for.

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

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

• 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.

• To prepare for the part 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. (On her role in Two Women)

• 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.

• 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….

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.