Isabella Rossellini Quotes

True elegance for me is the manifestation of an independent mind.

When David left me I became totally brokenhearted.

I like to extend myself as an actress and David really helped me.

In interviews, the first question I get in America is always: 'What do you do to stay young?' I do nothing. I don't think aging is a problem. What irritates me a little is growing fatter. It irritates me that if I eat what I want to eat, it shows.

You don't do an experimental film to become rich, so the people who are involved are involved because they enjoy the creative aspect of it.

I never really think about what I have to do to stick to my image. I just follow what I like to do. Sometimes it's glamorous, sometimes it's not.

Women who stay true to themselves are always more interesting and beautiful to me: women like Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe and Anna Magnani - women who have style, chic, allure and elegance. They didn't submit to any standard of beauty - they defined it.

From the time I was a child I wanted to be like my mother. Not necessarily an actress - I never dreamed I'd have the courage. But an active, volatile woman like she was.

I wanted to make a film about my dad, a sort of love letter, and explain what I understood of his cinema, which was so utopian. I also wanted to give the sense of his cinema, because they have never been very big box-office, but they were very influential.

There is often a great disparity between a director's personal style and the movies he makes.

I don't wear much makeup, except during work. I felt lucky to be chosen to be a model. I used to joke, 'The next best thing to winning the lottery is having a beauty contract.'

I didn't think I was going to be an actress. Everybody in my family was in films, and they succeeded so much, I thought, 'It's better for me to do something else,' and they agreed.

Every time you work, it's a new film, and generally when you work with auteurs, people that write and direct their films, there's always an originality.

I seldom look at myself to avoid any self-criticism.

I live in the country. I'm a bird-watcher, an oyster-raiser. You know, I'll do anything that - raise dogs for the blind as a volunteer.

I live my everyday life as a person, and I react to my photos from a certain distance. When I look at a photo, I detach myself and look at it as a product - not as me, Isabella.

People use mobile phones in this very distracting environment where you probably don't have time to watch a 30-minute film, but you might have time to look at a film for a minute and learn something you didn't expect while you walk on the streets.

I've had a lot of 'aha' moments, but the big 'aha' about growing older is the mental freedom.

There are consequences with age, so you have to evolve. I've loved becoming a filmmaker. But I would love to continue modeling, and there isn't really any job for me. It's being marginalized - that's the sad part.

If a hamster has too many babies she knows she cannot carry, she not only abandons them, but she eats them. That means she doesn't have to go out and hunt for food for herself.

I am the daughter of Mr. Neo-realism: I should gravitate towards narrative simply told, character, the truth. And I do love those movies.

Many years in New York has made me urban, and I won't eat my chicken because I met him personally!

Market research shows that older women like seeing older women in ads, and that younger women do, too - because they see them and are not frightened of growing older.

I always have parmigiano-reggiano, olive oil and pasta at home. When people get sick, they want chicken soup; I want spaghetti with parmesan cheese, olive oil and a bit of lemon zest. It makes me feel better every time.

I didn't want to become an actress because the competition with my mother would have been to much to live up to.

There are so many spiders, and their rituals, their mating rituals, their courtship ritual, can be very, very different.

When I grew up, we always had our chickens, and we ate our eggs, and we ate our chickens. The family always had a pig, and we would kill it at Christmas and eat it for three or four months afterwards.

I always say that in my career as an actress, I've always worked with people like David Lynch or Guy Maddin or Peter Weir who are considered not mainstream directors and that could be because they are like my dad. They are pioneers, and pioneers, by definition, invent something new.

It always amazed me that people believed I was this beautiful object.

I live in New York, and the only live animals you see are cockroaches, rats and pigeons, which I admire immensely. When I see an animal that thrives in the garbage, I feel relief; in our urban environment, other animals are dying out.

Maybe there's some kind of modeling that can be tedious, like catalogue modeling, but there's a kind of modeling, with runways or working with Richard Avedon, that's not very far from acting. Besides the fact that you don't have a partner to react to, the body language is the same.

When I was a teenager, I thought maybe I'll be a filmmaker, making film documentaries. My dream when I was a girl was I would be hired by 'National Geographic' or work with David Attenborough, but it didn't happen. I became a model.

I am much more radical in my beliefs than my products represent me to be.

It took me a long time to be accepted as an actress, I think, because of the modeling and because of my mother.

The red carpet has become like a parallel business. The next day, there are TV programmes, and magazines, and it's all, 'Do you like the dress or not like the dress?' and 'Did she look fat?' To keep borrowing dresses and jewellery is like a full-time job. And you have to be a fantasy, which you can never be, so you always feel depressed.

I would love to be a field biologist. I would love to do what Jane Goodall did, just totally immerse myself in the life of one specific species for years and study every aspect of its behavior until little by little, all of these patterns become clear. That would be great, but I don't know if I have it left in me.

But I don't really see myself as a role model. I'm not a dictator, or someone who wants to be adored!

Before Darwin, our world was very religious. People saw altruism as something given by God for us to be good so that we could go to Paradise.

I believe in a set of values I cannot live by. I set high goals for myself, I seek perfection, dream of exotic faraway places. But ultimately, what I long for isn't far away at all. It's in my own backyard. Imperfection charms me, familiar things move me ... a celebration of what we have, instead of what we long for. That for me, is glamor.

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

When I took my clothes off in Blue Velvet, I wanted to convey the brutality of sex abuse. I wanted to look like a quartered cow hanging in a butcher shop as well as disturbingly appealing.

I've always been an entertainer all my life; I come from a family of entertainers. I always made, very pretentiously, a comparison with Agatha Christie. Her inspiration was crime, and I'm sure she must have taken courses or read about crime, because it was the basis of her stories. But ultimately, it was her own fantasy.

I have the most fun writing and directing. And I always choose myself as the lead actor.

Most people divorce because one in the couple falls in love with someone else: it's a common cause of divorce. I still think that it's tinted - this is my opinion - with a veil of racism and American puritanism.

It's a new business for me to be a filmmaker.

My father used to say that you could only access culture before cinema by learning to read and write, but that once cinema was invented, knowledge was available to anybody.

The first time I went to Hollywood, I was 25 years old. My background was mostly Italian.

To be an icon is a big job - it's beyond acting. And sometimes it pays, and sometimes it doesn't.

A lot of the advertisement is done by saying: first of all, have a complex about who you are.

Animation translates well to a small screen. When you look at Walt Disney or Chuck Jones - you know, Bugs Bunny - there really isn't any difference if you watch on a very big screen or a computer screen.

I grew up in a family of filmmakers, so I always wanted to make films about animals, especially comical films. Something about animals amuses me. And they have a great mystery. It's the same mystique some people might feel looking at the stars or the ocean.

Ever since I was a little girl, I have always loved animals and been fascinated with them.

I would like to be forgotten. What's so good about being remembered?

I'd like this to become my principal activity: to make films about animals. Of course it's always interesting to model, but it depends who you are working with. I will continue to make acting, too, but I'm old - I'm getting tired of it.

It's nice to go and be a guest on a television sitcom. It pays well; it's easy because generally it's a supporting role, so you go, you do two or three things, you're in touch with people there. They're widely popular, so they're seen by many people.

That is the great pleasure of working with great directors. You get to look at the world through many different prisms. I guess I love talent, whatever form it takes.

My perfume, Manifesto, was based on the scent of basil.

I've always been interested in animal behavior, and I keep reading about it because it's so surprising all the time - so many things are happening around us that we neglect to look at. Part of the passion I have for biology is based on this wonderment.

There is this idea that you have to play heroines or women who succeed.

I always loved experimenting in film.

If you go to a therapist, they say, 'Are you sure? How do you feel about your wrinkles?' And I say, 'I don't know, because I don't really see them.' I see my hands, but I don't see my face, so it's not a torment. I only see it for five minutes in the morning when I brush my teeth! When you read women's magazines you always read about this drama of getting old, about anti-aging cream and plastic surgery and whatever else. But I think if you're independent, like I have grown to be, it's welcome.

Mammals are very close to us, but bugs are strange. They're more mysterious and exotic.

As I grew older, I worked less as an actor and as a model, and I went back to what I had tried to do when I was young but wasn't really available. I'm so glad now to be in my sixties and to be able to go back to school.

In America, they are paranoid about ruining the reputations of people once they are dead and cannot answer back. They have this fascination which to me seems cruel and morbid. I do not want any part of it.

When I grew up in Italy in the 1950s, it was still very agricultural. Food was very important; produce was very important. Everyone made their own olive oil. It took me a long time after I moved here to understand that Americans are much further away from their food.