Luigi Barzini
Quotes by Luigi Barzini
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Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go unchanged, as deadly as before.
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Many Americans preferred to live in a consoling world of their own creation, just as many of them preferred the synthetic, the make-believe, the man-made products, to those of God, in other words the imitation chemical vanilla.
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In those years the adjective American, added to any noun, indicated something naturally excellent, a drastic improved version of a dreary Old World article, or a diabolically new invention.
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Americans (as seen from a distance) were known to get things done, ruthlessly, meticulously, quickly, against all obstacles.
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I think I was lucky to be exposed to American life when both the United States and I were young and full of stupendous illusions.
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The Italian way of life cannot be considered a success except by temporary visitors. It solves no problems. It makes them worse.
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Many Italian men are disposed to make love at the drop of a hat, anywhere, in a car, on a beach, behind a bush, on mountain summits, under water, or even in a bed, during the day or at night.
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She was as unmistakably American as the pink two-cent Washington postage stamp, as the Stars and Stripes, definitely more American in my eyes than the frizzy-haired big-bosomed dolls who won the title of Miss America each year at Atlantic City
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Winning wars, after all, is the ultimate test not of the quality of single men but of their capacity to work together and accept common sacrifices.
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Some of these teen-aged innocent angels were consummate experts in the diabolical arts of keeping a boy, or a number of boys at the same time, in a frenzied state of hopeful uncertainty.
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Public and private food in America has become eatable, here and there extremely good. Only the fried potatoes go on unchanged, as deadly as before.
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They eat the dainty food of famous chefs with the same pleasure with which they devour gross peasant dishes, mostly composed of garlic and tomatoes, or fisherman's octopus and shrimps, fried in heavily scented olive oil on a little deserted beach.
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Most of them were as unaware of their breathtaking beauty as wild animals; they seemed as tranquil and unself-conscious as deer in a forest, but who chewed gum instead of grass.
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If a man is intelligent and Fascist, he is not honest. If he is honest and Fascist, he is not intelligent.
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Who in Europe could have thought of the disappearing bed, a bed during the night, a handsome wardrobe during the day? Where else [than in the United States] could the rocking chair have been invented, in which a man could move and sit still at the same time?
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Italians have discovered America for the Americans; taught poetry, statesmanship, and the ruses of trade to the English; military art to the Germans; cuisine to the French; acting and ballet dancing to the Russians; and music to everybody.
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There were always stupendous (and jealously guarded) beauties in Italy, Sienese Madonnas or Botticelli Venuses who were greeted with hushed silence and by the turning of men's heads when they walked down a busy street.
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The varieties of spoken American could not be counted, and most of them were incomprehensible to me, used as I was to the clean-cut pronunciation of Italian.
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I myself spent hours in the Columbia library as intimidated and embarrassed as a famished gourmet invited to a dream restaurant where every dish from all the world's cuisines, past and present, was available on request.
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It was difficult for me to distinguish one class from another [in America], everybody looked middle-class in European eyes, including the black students in the university and the beggars in the street.
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