Sorrentino Quotes & Sayings

All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers. — Gilbert Sorrentino

Wild dogs? Or just Clayton? -Nick Sorrentino (Bitten) — Kelley Armstrong

If you want something better for your life, you've got to start by believing you deserve it. — Sheryl Sorrentino

The fear of old age is something that one feels when they're younger. Once you get to being old, you're already there, so you don't even think about it anymore. — Paolo Sorrentino

He hadn't "abused" alcohol, but had spent almost four years sitting in a chair drinking jug wine around the clock and looking, variously, at the wall, the window blind, and the TV screen. — Gilbert Sorrentino

I think cinema has this beautiful component. It's a universal language. — Paolo Sorrentino

Wasting time is something that people do or feel all over the world, not just in Italy. — Paolo Sorrentino

Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?
A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers. — Gilbert Sorrentino

You are perfectly justified in scoffing at the outrageous transparency of it if I tell you that his wife said that he was so pale that he looked as if he had seen a ghost, but that is, indeed, what she said. Art cannot rescue anybody from anything. — Gilbert Sorrentino

There's one thing that I like about Rome that was stated by Napoleon: that from sublime to pathetic is only one step away. And in Rome there's a constant shifting between sublime and pathetic. — Paolo Sorrentino

Art cannot save anybody from anything. — Gilbert Sorrentino

Thank you to Italy. That is a crazy country but beautiful. — Paolo Sorrentino

Fashion Fact: Most people make the assumption that I wear trendy shades the majority of the time (often indoors) to protect my eyes from the elements. But in fact it's the reverse. I'm protecting the elements from the brilliance of my eyes. — Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino

I have learned that I will not pay any attention to anything people say about my movies, because people say things that are all over the place. — Paolo Sorrentino

I usually don't say anything to the actors. It works better for me because when they come to the set, they are at the same time scared and excited because they are not well aware of what will happen. — Paolo Sorrentino

I watch a lot of football. — Paolo Sorrentino

Everybody loves me, babies, dogs, ya know, hot girls, cougars. I just have unbelievable mass appeal. — Mike Sorrentino

They want politics and think it will save them. At best, it gives direction to their numbed desires. But there is no politics but the manipulation of power through language. Thus the latter's constant debasement. — Gilbert Sorrentino

I don't use Twitter. I'm a serious person. — Paolo Sorrentino

If there's any greater exhibit of the malleability of human nature than the sight of someone standing, absently waiting for the light to change at a deserted intersection, I don't know what it is. — Christopher Sorrentino

There are contemporary artists that I hate with all my heart. These are provocateurs that are without feeling. Where is the real emotion? — Paolo Sorrentino

Only death can cure the hip dilettante. — Gilbert Sorrentino

The maimings of love are endlessly funny.... — Gilbert Sorrentino

Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino makes zombie movies, which probably comes as a surprise to him. At the center of his best and most recent pictures are the walking dead, characters in a race with themselves across mortality's finish line, their spirits arriving before the rest of them. — Steve Erickson

... and to all you other cats and chicks out there, sweet or otherwise, buried deep in wordy tombs, who never yet have walked from off the page, a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers! — Gilbert Sorrentino

Rome is a city where in every corner you have a reminder of the sacred world. That's why I have sacred music, minimalist sacred music, which is also music I like, because at the end of the day, that's what I want to do. — Paolo Sorrentino

Going around Rome, you can find beauty because, quite simply, Rome is very beautiful. But the beauty of the people is sometimes harder to discover. — Paolo Sorrentino

I do read a lot. I read more than I watch movies. — Paolo Sorrentino

The way I work with my cinematographer is not based on general principles, but the ideas are triggered by the locations where we shoot. — Paolo Sorrentino

What I find compelling is the moment in which people realize, with suffering and pain, that in the past there was a time when they were happy, because back then the present and the future coincided - they were one and the same thing. — Paolo Sorrentino

What I'm interested in is human beings alone. — Paolo Sorrentino

There is no sincere stupidity that doesn't create, eventually, its own rationale, conduct, operating procedures, its own critical formulae whereby it may be, in all seriousness, discussed: witness the advertising business. Witness the best-seller list. Areas of idiocy within which various degrees of the spurious are compared. — Gilbert Sorrentino

On Being Blue celebrates both language and that which it represents and carefully draws our attention to that difficult middle ground on which the writer finds himself in lifelong struggle to join the two without sullying or smearing the clarities of either. — Gilbert Sorrentino

Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange. — Gilbert Sorrentino

What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? — Gilbert Sorrentino

Rapacity plus taste is a formidable combination, since it so often passes for intelligence. One pities the artist in a world of such predators, all of whom are deeply engaged in the arts too. — Gilbert Sorrentino

What is this thing called a kiss? French, tongue, soul, chaste, motherly, fatherly, brotherly, sisterly, ass, genital, Judas, trembling, rough, hesitant, sweet, soft, wet, dying, fevered, good-night, farewell, burning, and chocolate. — Gilbert Sorrentino

It is no wonder lesbians love women. — Gilbert Sorrentino

The thing is, even though you think a lot about your movie, and there's a lot of preparation behind it, the final end result completely goes beyond it. It's not something you're aware of. — Paolo Sorrentino

Rome is a city I love very much. I have lived there since I was a child. — Paolo Sorrentino

I like to synthesize; I hate analysis. I don't like to take a subject and break it down into parts; I like to take disparate parts and put them all together and see what happens. I believe the old saw that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Of course, it may also be less. But it's the parts that interest me; it's not the whole. — Gilbert Sorrentino

I want to be 82 and doing movies with Paolo Sorrentino where people are like, "This is gold." — Ed Speleers

I hibernate. I hibernate until the next project takes shape in my mind. — Paolo Sorrentino

A writer discovers what he knows as he knows it, i.e., as he makes it. No artist writes in order to objectify an "idea" already formed. It is the poem or novel or story that quite precisely tells him what he didn't know he knew: he knows, that is, only in terms of his writing. This is, of course, simply another way of saying that literary composition is not the placing of a held idea into a waiting form. — Gilbert Sorrentino

Andreotti had style and class; Berlusconi does not — Paolo Sorrentino