Italo Calvino Quotes

We tend to have mixed feelings about the holy. There is a sense in which we are at the same time attracted to it and repulsed by it. Something draws us toward it, while at the same time we want to run away from it. We can’t seem to decide which way we want it. Part of us yearns for the holy, while part of us despises it. We can’t live with it, and we can’t live without it.

As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.

The tension of opposites: Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.

I've been simultaneously drawn to and repelled from Hollywood for years.

A lot of what I was wanting to do in my work and what I have been doing has been about the unexpected... that unexpected situation of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time.

I like characters who are contradictory.

I both love and do not love; and am mad and not mad.

I have fervently been on both sides of that question at different times.

The best ideas make you want to say 'yes' and 'no' in the same breath.

It's a weird dynamic - I guess there is a fine line between hope and sadness. Sometimes you can be feeling both at the same time.

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.

There is a thin line between attraction and repulsion

I always used to say when I was on television that I prefer to be on stage and when on stage I prefer to do television. Typical human condition.

The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.

I've always been drawn to discomfort and that limbo of unease you get between comedy and tragedy.

I'm really schizophrenic about that, because on the one hand I would say, yes there is, there's something inherently, even violent about it, it's wild and raw and all this.

Nothing is ever simple. What do you do when you discover you like parts of the role you're trying to escape?

I think we do good things and bad things, sometimes simultaneously - or they may be the same thing.

The best characters are the ones that somehow manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time. If you do that, you're at the center of the universe - if you can find characters who are more ambiguous and can raise more questions than answers.

When people say 'love to hate', they actually mean 'love to be appalled by' - if they truly hated them, they'd never repeat a catch phrase.

As an actor, there's a bit of you that's decided you want to be looked at and watched, but there's a paradoxical bit that wants to run away.

When I'm doing a drama, I wish I was doing something funny. When I'm doing something funny, I wish I was doing something more serious. I think it's just human nature.

To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.

It's odd how violence and humor so often go together, isn't it?

I do believe as human beings we are a great mass of contradictions.