“Love, in itself, doesn’t trouble me at all. It gives you courage, security, helps you to ignore other trifling things. It’s in great passion that I have never believed.



Give me one example of a great passion, a true one, one with Christian names, surnames, and addresses, not some legendary one, and I’ll believe it. You see? You’re silent.



Great passions, my dear, don’t exist, they’re liars’ fantasies. What do exist are little loves that may last for a short or a longer while. That’s why, every time I’ve loved a man, I’ve never let it overwhelm me. I have loved him, I’ve even been jealous of the flies touching him, but I have known all along that it had to end. And when it ends…you cry a bit, but then you get over it. Two, three months later, you meet him in the street and it seems impossible you could ever have lost any sleep or shed any tears over him. Pouf!”



-Anna Magnani, quoted in 1963 interview (reprinted in Oriana Fallaci’s Gli antipatici)