Luigi Pirandello

“A fact is like a sack which won't stand up when it is empty. In order to make it stand up, you must put into it the reasons and feelings which caused it to exist.”

“Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”

“It is so. If you think so.”

“We all have a world of things inside ourselves and each one of us has his own private world. How can we understand each other if in my words I put the sense and value of things as I see them, while you who listen to me must inevitably translate them according to the sense and value they have for you?”

“Whatever is a reality today, whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be, like the reality of yesterday, an illusion tomorrow.”

“In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.”

“The stage is a place where we can be whatever we want to be. And for that reason, it's a place of great freedom.”

“My opinion is a view I hold until—well, until I find something that changes it.”

“What is the stage? It’s a place, boys, a place where people play at being serious, a place where they act comedies. We’ve got to act a comedy now, dead serious.”

“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

“Each of us, when we appear before others, is clothed in a character of our own invention.”

“But don't you see that the whole trouble lies here? In words, words.”

“For me, the theatre is a place where I can be myself, or at least a part of myself that I can't be in real life.”

“I am not what I am, but what I do.”

“A name is a label, and when a man is given one, he is ended.”