Top 64 Italian American Quotes
#1. My husband is actually Italian-American, and he thought I was Italian when he first met me.
Andrea Navedo
#2. I've played some gangster roles, but that's obviously not me. When you're an Italian-American New York actor, it's just an easy way to get cast.
Michael Imperioli
#3. I learned when I was a student in Connecticut. I had an Italian-American teacher who gave me classes for a week, and then said, "Okay, you're ready." And I wasn't ready. I didn't know how to drive!. But he knew the policeman who gave the test. And that's how I got through.
Sandra Cisneros
#4. I was possessed with a wonderful example of my Italian American family. They would come over and join us every Sunday, all my aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, and I would sing for them.
Tony Bennett
#5. My family was blue collar, a middle-class kind of thing. My father was born in Detroit, Italian-American. My mother is English. She acted on the stage with Diana Dors. Her parents were French.
Lorraine Bracco
#6. My working-class Italian-American parents didn't go to school, there were no books in the house.
Martin Scorsese
#7. Mulberry Street was the beating heart of the Italian-American experience, but you don't find those gangsters now. I live with a bunch of yuppies and models.
Abel Ferrara
#8. The Mob loved Sinatra not just because he was Italian-American, but because he had crossed over into a nether world in which they could never belong. And he got there because he could do something few people in the world could do as well, and no one in the same way: he could sing.
Nancy Jo Sales
#9. We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.
Francis Ford Coppola
#10. As an Italian-American, I have a special responsibility to be sensitive to ethnic stereotypes.
Al D'Amato
#11. The passion of the Italian or the Italian-American population is endless for food and lore and everything about it.
Mario Batali
#12. Explain to me what Italian-American culture is. We've been here 100 years. Isn't Italian-American culture American culture? That's because we're so diverse, in terms of intermarriage.
Al Pacino
#13. I grew up in the Lower East Side, an Italian American - more Sicilian, actually.
Martin Scorsese
#14. My family was all born in Sicily and I'm Italian-American. They're the real thing. They're authentic Italians, and honestly they're the most open-minded, nicest people in the world and nothing can really offend them. That's the way I think true Sicilians are.
Vinny Guadagnino
#15. I grew up within Italian-American neighborhoods, everybody was coming into the house all the time, kids running around, that sort of stuff, so when I finally got into my own area, so to speak, to make films, I still carried on.
Martin Scorsese
#16. Playing a positive role on a network television show, it was great. I took it as a responsibility. Poncherello was supposed to be Poncherelli, and then when I got this part I said, 'You know what, this guy isn't going to be Italian-American, he's gonna be Hispanic American.' And they went with it.
Erik Estrada
#17. I started cooking 30-something years ago. When I was 14, 15, I was a short-order cook in a snack bar. That was at a place called the Gran Centurions. It was an Italian-American swim club my parents belonged to.
Tom Colicchio
#18. We are offering to the American public a line of delicious Italian-American foods. They will be available through the Internet, shopping networks and national store distribution.
Rocco DiSpirito
#19. I'm very proud of being Italian-American, but people don't realize that the mafia is just this aberration. The real community is built on the working man, the guy who's the cop, the fireman, the truck driver, the bus driver.
Chazz Palminteri
#20. Early in my career, people wanted to pigeonhole me as the bad guy because I'm of Italian-American descent, which they often were when I started out. You have to fight against it. One of the things that helps is the ability to do comedy.
Stanley Tucci
#21. I like to cook Puerto Rican food. That's what I grew up on: rice, beans, meat, some Italian-American food. I know my way around the kitchen.
Jennifer Lopez
#22. Also we Italians have something to Elvis Presley: to offer one of the rare occasions when we prefer to be Italian rather than American.
Indro Montanelli
#23. Italian girls are famous for being snobby and expecting men to make the first move. In America, if I don't make eye contact, the guys won't come over and talk. American girls just go for it. You men are spoiled.
Silvia Colloca
#24. Everyone says we have our first African American president. Has there ever been a Jewish president? An Italian president? They don't say a damn thing about that. You think we're still fighting the Civil War or something. If you want to mention it in passing, OK. But don't dwell on it.
Monte Irvin
#25. I'm a multi-lingual Kundalini-dancing shapeshifter to the 69th degree.
I know French, Italian, Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Greek, Latin, Gaelic, Scottish, English, and American English.
I'm cunninglingual.
Sienna McQuillen
#26. I don't really consider myself an American filmmaker like, say, Ron Howard might be considered an American filmmaker. If I'm doing something and it seems to me to be reminiscent of an Italian giallo, I'm gonna to do it like an Italian giallo.
Quentin Tarantino
#27. If American chemical industries are oligopolistic, British, German, French, Italian, indeed European, chemical industries are monopolistic.
George W. Stocking
#28. We are Germans. We are Armenians. French, Italian, Russian, American, Asian, African ... many other nationalities. We are Christians, Jewish, Muslim and Hindu. We are black, we are white. We are a community of some many differences, so complex and yet so simple. We do not need to have war!
Michael Jackson
#29. Immigrants have always come into the country with low levels of education. Whether it's the Irish or Italian or Polish, here is the land of opportunity. It's where people come in at the bottom and build themselves up. To try to bring in people who have already made it is un-American.
Lionel Sosa
#30. I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.
Allegra Huston
#31. There are still a lotta nice Sicilian boys in New Orleans. (A nonna's advice to a zitella.)
Traci Andrighetti
#32. I discovered right away at the airport that Italian men were way too attentive.
Glenda Helms
#33. Everything you need to know to enjoy your trip to Italy is in my Conversational Italian for Travelers books!
Kathryn Occhipinti
#34. It's funny, because I've never thought of myself as a Hispanic actor, like in 'American Gangster,' I'm playing an Italian. I've always been fortunate enough to have been allowed to play all these diverse roles.
Yul Vazquez
#35. I've played American, Italian, Greek, French. I've been really lucky that way.
Chita Rivera
#36. I have Czech, I have Russian, I have English, I have Italian. Uh, what am I missing? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I'm your classic American mutt.
Joe Lhota
#37. Within two months I made the grand slam: covers of 'American Vogue', 'Italian Vogue', 'British Vogue', and 'French Vogue'.
Linda Evangelista
#38. The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.
Katharine Hepburn
#39. Then, I will be a real Italian girl, instead of a total American who still can't hear someone across the street to his friend Marco without wanting instinctively to yell back Polo!
Elizabeth Gilbert
#40. I see the face of a child. He lives in a great city. He is black. Or he is white. He is Mexican, Italian, Polish. None of that matters. What matters, he's an American child.
Richard M. Nixon
#41. If Nonna sensed weakness, she'd zero in for the kill
Rosie Genova
#42. I love and admire the American culture and the American dream. I learnt so many things about the American shoe industry and marketing strategies. I caught the secrets of American casual wear, that is elegant and wearable, retro and modern, and mixed it with an Italian touch, luxurious and handmade.
Diego Della Valle
#43. What are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.
Thomas Jefferson
#44. It's all very Italian (and decidedly un-American): to insist that doing the right thing is the most pleasurable thing, and that the act of consumption might be an act of addition rather than subtraction.
Michael Pollan
#45. I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one ... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.
Joe Strummer
#46. I want to express our grieve and condolences to the families of two hostages: one American, Dr. Warren Weinstein and an Italian Giovanni LaPorto who were tragically killed in a U.S. counterterrorism operation.
Barack Obama
#47. Starbucks itself is a product of diverse global cultures: "Starbuck's customers, whether in Zurich or Beirut, are drinking an American version of an Italian evolution of a beverage invented by Arabs brewed from a bean discovered by Africans."71
Patricia J. Campbell
#48. I tried to learn the languages - Italian, Spanish, and German - not to successfully. Working on a European set isn't a hell of a lot different from working on an American set.
Lee Van Cleef
#49. Poor Englishwomen! When it comes to their clothes- well, the French reaction is a shrug, the Italian reaction a spreading of the hands and a lifting of the eyes and the American reaction simply one of amused contempt.
James Laver
#50. Here she barked out her greetings in Italian, anxious to disassociate herself from the horseless American cowboys and above all from her own kind, the truly lost and unwanted, who move like leaves around the edges of the world, gathering only long enough to wait in line and see if there is any mail
John Cheever
#51. I really liked the food in Japan. There is something so organized, neat, and methodical about it. They put a lot of care and quality into their cooking. I also love Mediterranean, New American, and Italian food, because the cuisines borrow influences from all over the world.
Sasha Cohen
#53. he normally had his pastry shipped from Boston's north end
Leighann Dobbs
#54. I was a young film student around the time of the new wave in film in the 1970s; old Hollywood was naff and over. For me, as a film student, I was going to see French and Italian cinema; American cinema was 'Easy Rider' and 'Taxi Driver.' Everything was gritty.
Gillian Armstrong
#55. I'm a first generation American. My mother is Italian and Russian and a lot of other things, and my father is Uruguayan. In fact, my mother's been married twice, and both men were Uruguayan. So I grew up in a very European/Latin American-influenced home.
Sebastian Arcelus
#56. Hillary Clinton was actually inducted into the Irish American Hall of Fame yesterday. Hillary said she's very proud of her Irish heritage or her Italian heritage or her Asian heritage. Whatever it takes to seal the deal with you guys. I've got to get into that Oval Office.
Jimmy Fallon
#57. Even American women are not felt to be persons in the same sense as the male immigrants among the Hungarians, Poles, Russian Jews,
not to speak of Italians, Germans, and the masters of all of us
the Irish!
Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi
#58. She's not Italian in any way you'd notice. No garlic smell or big armpit hair. She came here to attend medical school. Frigging medical school. In Iowa. The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here. The
Chuck Palahniuk
#59. It's almost like that's the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian ... Or becoming a Negro for four years.
Josh Alan Friedman
#60. No matter where you're from - you can be Native American, Italian, Jewish, Latino, African-American - whatever you are, we're all distant relatives.
Nas
#61. My husband is American but Italian. Then I have the Mexicano side. I see both in my kids. My daughter is more Italian - she leans towards pizza - and my son leans more towards guacamole and puts lime in everything.
Thalia
#62. The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn't work and you're going to hit a brick wall at some point.
Rupert Everett
#63. My father was an American who could cuss in Italian and make an aria out of it. It was wonderful to watch. But then again, he was a Gemini. I believe in that stuff.
Dominic Chianese
#64. When I make an American movie it's going to come out all over the world-it doesn't happen the same way for an Italian film or a French film.
Monica Bellucci
