Venice Quotations

I came to Venice for the first time in 1968 and was lucky enough to make the acquaintanceship, and then the friendship, of two Venetians, Roberta and Franco, who remain my best friends here after almost 50 years.

Amsterdam was a great surprise to me. I had always thought of Venice as the city of canals; it had never entered my mind that I should find similar conditions in a Dutch town.

My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.

Is it worth while to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?

Venice, the most touristy place in the world, is still just completely magic to me.

Venice never quite seems real, but rather an ornate film set suspended on the water.

I will never forget experiencing Venice for the first time. It feels like you are transported to another time - the art, music, food and pure romance in the air is like no other place.

I have long believed that celebrity, the way we worship and package and sell our pop stars, is what filled the need for gods that was once filled by the pictures in stained glass. Hollywood is post-Christian Venice - in other words, a pantheon of saints without the hassle and heartache of religion.

If I could live in one city and do every single thing I do there, I would choose Venice. You can't turn your head without seeing something amazing.

Like Venice, Italy, New Orleans is a cultural treasure. And everyone who lived in the city should be allowed to come back. But that doesn't mean that they all should live in exactly the same spot that they lived before.

I've been kind of submerged in my own little geographic location for a really long time in Venice Beach

Venice, Italy, survives 365 days out of every year in water; New Orleans can survive a few days of water if it has to.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

Nothing ever seems straightforward in Venice, least of all its romances.

I have an Italian comedy at the Venice Film Festival.

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk.

I love dressing up, but I do find the red carpet thing quite stressful. When I went to Venice Film Festival last month to promote 'Wuthering Heights,' I told my boyfriend beforehand 'I will be a nightmare, I will cry, I will be nervous.' Actually once I was there, it was fine.

Kristina has been to the Maldives but never to Venice, and I have been to Venice but never to the Maldives.

Still teenagers, Harry and Peter Brant II have never disappointed when I've seen them out and about in New York, Paris, and Venice (Which is where all schoolkids go on field trips, right?) They're not afraid of wearing brooches, capes, embroidery, and even a dab-bing of makeup.

Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

It is the city of mirrors, the city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottage princes' palaces.

I love Santa Monica and Venice because I like the beach. I have a lot of friends in that area.

I like not fair terms and a villain's mind.

I am not bound to please thee with my answer.

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine is a sad one.

Some of my brothers tell me it would be in the family tradition, because Marco Polo was an Italian and went from Venice to the Orient. That part of the world has been liberated from some of the restrictions of previous societies. Seeing that dynamic would be a good experience to get me ready for the 21st century.

Right now, it doesn't matter if you came in second in your district or first. We have Palm Harbor, Venice and Plant in our region, and we're pretty good. Anyone of the four teams can win our region. Whoever plays the best game will win. It's not about being the best team, but the team who plays the best.

I got more potholes in my concrete slab, ... than all of Venice has in their streets.

This is the only place that I don't feel out of place, because everyone here is out of place.

I loved going surfing down on Venice Beach. Id go out with a board under my arm and think, I cant do that in Cranhill.

It is a sign of change in the traditional Venetian dialectic between doing and not doing. I hope that Venice can enrich the album of western architecture with contemporary pages such as this.

Our philosophy is to work hard and that's all we know how to do. We played Venice baseball like it's supposed to be played.

Those investigations and those charges generally relate to a perception by the regulators ... that the city of Venice had become a rogue utility. That, in fact, there were a cadre of employees within the utility who had taken it upon themselves to get rid of the reclaimed water anywhere they could.

Wagner was a monster. He was anti-Semitic on Mondays and vegetarian on Tuesdays. On Wednesday he was in favor of annexing Newfoundland, Thursday he wanted to sink Venice and Friday he wanted to blow up the pope.

Valentine's Day is going to be great. We're here in Italy, close enough to go to Venice for a couple of days. The rest is personal.

We played the way Venice High is supposed to play. Even if we would have lost tonight, I still would have been proud of the way we played.

It's a fault line where the flotsam and energy that washes up from the Pacific collides with all of urban America crashing in from the other direction.

A realist, in Venice, would become a romantic by mere faithfulness to what he saw before him.

I had my dreams of Venice, but nothing that I had dreamed was as impossible as what I found.

Wherever you go in life, you will feel somewhere over your shoulder a pink, castellated shimmering presence, the domes and riggings and crooked pinacles of the Serenissima

When you come to Venice, you do special work.

Quentin [Tarantino] called me and said: "Yeah, you've got to be in my movie. You've got to be in Death Proof." But he made me audition. I was like: "Dude, I don't even want to do this..." So I left the casting of Hostel: Part II to drive to Venice, where Quentin was holding his casting, and the person ahead of me was Derek Richardson from Hostel 1 and he was like: "Dude, what are you doing here?" I said: "Don't ask!"

In memory Venice is always magic.

Everything was happening all the time. You never needed television.

Go to Venice. Find Scorpia. And you will find your destiny.

Venice Beach: proof of the biological impossibility of imagining a person being simultaneously good-looking and poor.

To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself, but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius.

All that glisters is not gold.

The trouble is, walking in Venice becomes compulsive once you start. Just over the next bridge, you say, and then the next one beckons.

Let's run away to Venice, and hide out in an old movie theater. We can dye our hair blonde, so no one will ever find us!

You have to know accounting. It's the language of practical business life. It was a very useful thing to deliver to civilization. I've heard it came to civilization through Venice which of course was once the great commercial power in the Mediterranean. However, double entry bookkeeping was a hell of an invention.

I also want to raise the possibility that there are, in the very long term, "virtue effects" in economics- for instance that widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry book-keeping gave to the heyday of Venice. I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodomand Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on.

I used to be a street performer, and performances on Venice Beach, it's like playing the Apollo: They let you know if they don't like you!

Working in Venice was like a four-month guided tour of the city. It was like shooting a film inside a museum.

We started getting inquiries from Europe as soon as the film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Yes he did, Scooter -- just look in the Pitcher of Venice and you'll see that exact quote.

Yes he did, ScooterÊ-- just look in the Pitcher of Venice and you'll see that exact quote.

Venice brings me luck. There is no great role without a great director, so from the bottom of my heart I thank Patrice.

Venice can become the place for confirming the importance of seven new directors that are now becoming, for everybody, the most important contemporary directors.

Venice is truly magical. The Devon-Dorset coast in England is so beautiful, and its sandstone cliffs are full of fossils, which can make for some very exciting walks. And I love Halifax, a great place with all the modern things you could want, plus a wonderful sense of history, and, of course, the sea.

Venissa is a perfect destination for day-trippers from Venice proper who are searching for great food and a little adventure; it's a 30-minute jaunt by vaporetto from St. Mark's, quicker by water taxi.

The talent is at the Venice Film Festival for the world premiere, ... That screening started about an hour ago.

The Taxpayers League is using scare tactics and is trying to intimidate the Venice City Council members by adding this sentence in the ad, 'Our PAC will inform you of any council person who places development interests ahead of the citizens of Venice,'

It was a lot closer than 35-7. Venice deserves a lot of credit. They are well-coached and I respect them. They played us down to the wire.

We went to Paris and Pisa and Venice and Florence, all over Europe. The first few months were hard, but it was a good experience for the kids.

A lot of it is down to chance, down to what films are ready. But this year there were more U.S. premieres than ever before. Even when compared to Cannes, it has done well. It may not have the commercial razzmatazz but in terms of film quality, Venice probably came out ahead.

This shows how important Venice now is for American cinema.

This is real big anytime you can come out and win a tournament. You gotta remember we started out 0-2, and nobody thought we'd be in the position. Venice is not the normal team that will come in and run up and down. To come in and slug it out and mix their style with ours is definitely good. We'll need a few more like this down the road.

The next three years are very much going to be about the future of Venice. We have the Commercial Mixed Use District coming up (Tuesday), and the development of the marina and properties at (Venice Municipal) Airport. ... Now that we've worked through some of the problems of the past, we can look forward to where Venice will be 20 years from now.

Sultan Mehmet had good relations with the Medici family and other powerful Italian clans, especially in Venice and Florence, and at his request, they sent him artists and craftsmen by the dozen.

Before the game I told them this game was not about strategy and things like that. It was going to be about who wanted it more. For most of the game, it seemed Venice wanted it more. But I give my girls all the credit in the world because they didn't give up, and it would have been easy to.

Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.

Venice, that capital city of dream and intrigue, that double city (one above and seemingly solid, one below, wavering and reflected in the waters), which never disappoints ...

Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.

It is the only important film almost entirely shot in our city in the past 50 years. There has not been another film that has sung the beauty of Venice in the same way.

All those who are using Venice for their own interests must make a contribution to preserve the myth,

Venice once was dear, The pleasant place of all festivity, The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.

Everybody has an idea of where they're going to be. With the exception of North Port, Venice and some of the Booker kids, this a good half of (the district field).

This might be the best thing that ever happened to Venice as a 3-10 team in the district almost beat them.

We don't usually win things, but if you're going to be in competition, you might as well win. I've been laughed out of Venice with my films.

It is the custom of Venice to paint on canvas, either because it does not split and is not worm-eaten, or because pictures can be made of any size desired, or else for convenience... so that they can be sent anywhere with very little trouble and expense.

When Michelangelo was introduced to Titian, he said... that Titian's colouring and his style much pleased him, but that it was a pity that in Venice men did not learn to draw well from the beginning, and that those painters did not pursue a better method in their studies.

If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.

I have a good mind not to take Aloysius to Venice. I don't want him to meet a lot of horrid Italian bears and pick up bad habits.

Venice seemed incredibly lovely, elvishly lovely--to me like a dream of Old Gondor, or Pelargir of the Numenorean Ships, before the return of the Shadow.

The things of this world reveal their essential absurdity when they are put in the Venetian context. In the unreal realm of the canals, as in a Swiftian Lilliput, the real world, with its contrivances, appears as a vast folly.

Venice, as a city, was a foundling, floating upon the waters like Moses in his basket among the bulrushes.

...the tourist Venice is Venice.

The rationalist mind has always had its doubts about Venice. The watery city receives a dry inspection, as though it were a myth for the credulous- poets and honeymooners.

The perennial wonder of Venice is to peer at herself in her canals and find that she exists-incredible as it seems. It is the same reassurance that a looking-glass offers us: the guarantee that we are real.

On December 12, 1829, Paganini wrote his friend Germi: "The variations I've composed on the graceful Neapolitan ditty, 'Oh Mamma, Mama Cara,' outshine everything. I can't describe it!" He was writing from Karlsruhe, in the midst of his triumphal tour through Germany. That letter marks the earliest known mention of the variations that would become famous as "The Carnival of Venice." At the time of his letter, Paganini had already performed the piece in at least four concerts. From then on, it would be one of his most popular compositions.

Street performers, homemade crafts, keep your wallet in your front pocket and don't buy any crap!

If you read a lot, nothing is as great as you've imagined. Venice is - Venice is better.

For about 150 days a year in Venice, the sun doesn't show through the mist until noon.

Here at this far lost end of the continent, where the trail wagons had stopped and the people with them....

Venice was and is full of lost places where people put up for sale the last worn bits of their souls, hoping no one will buy.

Three to four times a week, I get up at 7:30 A.M. while the courts are empty at Venice Beach and play full court one-on-one.