Every artistic expression is either influenced by or adds something to politics.
A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.
I felt like an extraordinary hero. I was only five or six and I had the whole of life in my hands. Even if I had been driving the carriage of the sun I could not have felt any better.
I am the jongleur. I leap and pirouette, and make you laugh. I make fun of those in power, and I show you how puffed up and conceited are the big shots who go around making wars in which we are the ones who get slaughtered. I reveal them for what they are. I pull out the plug, and... pssss... they deflate.
Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture.
I'm not afraid of death, but I'm not courting it, either. If you have lived well, it is the fair conclusion to life.
In a way, the American side descended to Saddam's level, which happens often in these types of circumstances. That is why the people in Iraq do not accept the current state of affairs.
Satire can always be found everywhere. A people without love for satire is a dead people.
Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized.
It's not bad at all, getting a Nobel and making so many old fossils explode with rage.
For some time it's been my habit to use images when preparing a speech: rather than write it down, I illustrate it.
We thought the church had withdrawn from interfering in Italian politics... but instead there is a terrible resurgence. These are ugly signs for freedom of expression.
Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is finished.
I'm an idiot who won the Literature Nobel Prize.
Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible.
