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Fabrizio De André
114 quotes
“Patrizia Traverso e Stefano Tettamanti, Genova è mia moglie. La città di Fabrizio De André, Rizzoli, Milano, 2017. ISBN 978-88-17-09802-1”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Luigi Viva, Non per un dio ma nemmeno per gioco. Vita di Fabrizio De André, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2004. ISBN 88-07-81580-X”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I go out in public, I'm very afraid of being criticised. Controlling your facial muscles, for example, which should be an actor's job, is a specific thing, it's a precise skill. Putting my face in front of my songs annoyed me first of all because it seemed to me that my songs remained behind my face, whose muscles I couldn't control, and secondly, the fact that I couldn't control them also worried me. In the sense that I didn't consider myself an actor at all, that is, a person suited to showing his face in a certain way. Maybe I say “you sleep buried in a field of wheat” and I'm laughing, but I don't realise it because I'm not used to acting out what I'm saying. Because I wrote that song, I didn't have to act it out. I'm not capable of acting. I consider myself, in a way, someone who can also make music to accompany lyrics. I consider myself a guitar player. I don't go beyond that. I don't think I'm the ideal interpreter of my songs. Because to be an interpreter, you have to be something different. I don't think I'm an interpreter, because you always have to have the face you had when you wrote the verse. The face you had when you felt it. And it's not like I write verses in front of the mirror. In fact, I don't like myself that much.”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have no doubt about the total character that the struggle for the independence of Sardinia can take on if we work in a truly revolutionary way. Because the anti-colonial liberation struggle of a people is exemplary for all colonised peoples, indeed for all the exploited peoples of the world... In Nuoro, important work has begun, I believe, because it can have an impact on society... The signs should not be underestimated, because a new reality is emerging today in Sardinia with the need to liberate the masses and give them a national and international voice. Since I cannot help but say that I am against small and large power games, against bottlenecks and delays that are artfully manoeuvred, I am firmly convinced that the Sardinian knot will certainly not be untangled by the simple and imperturbable methods of changing the presidency of the Palace. Much more is needed! It is the people who must change things. Sardinia, with its own language, history and territory, has the right to be recognised as a nation.”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is a song that dates back to 1962, where I show that I have always had, both as a young man and as an old man, very few ideas, but on the other hand, they are fixed. In the sense that in this song I express what I have always thought: that there is very little merit in virtue and very little blame in error. Also because, despite my fifty-eight years, I have not yet managed to understand exactly what virtue is and what error is, because we only need to move to a different latitude to see how values become disvalues and vice versa. Not to mention moving through time: there were morals in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that are no longer recognised today. Today we complain: I see that there is great torment over the loss of values. We need to wait and see how they develop over time. I don't think that young people today have no values; they certainly have values that we have not yet managed to understand properly, because we are too attached to our own.”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Riccardo Mannerini was another great friend of mine. He was almost blind because when he was sailing on a Costa ship, a boiler exploded in his face. He committed suicide many years later, without ever receiving any compensation. He had bad experiences with the law because he was a true libertarian, so when someone wanted by the police knocked on his door, he would hide them in his house. He would even treat their wounds and remove the bullets from their bodies. We wrote Cantico dei Drogati (Song of the Drug Addicts) together, which for me, as someone who was totally addicted to alcohol, had a liberating, cathartic value. However, the text did not scare me; on the contrary, I was pleased with it. It is a common reaction among drug addicts to take pleasure in the fact that they are taking drugs. I took pleasure in drinking, partly because alcohol allowed my imagination to run wild.”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For me, Genoese is not a dialect but a language; after all, dialects rise to the dignity of languages for political and military reasons. [...] Genoese has at least 2,500 words of Arabic origin, which shows how intense contact with the Arabs was. Moreover, from a commercial point of view, apart from its rather sporadic relations with Europe (England and Holland), Genoa had to focus its trade on Africa, because on the other side there was Venice, and every time Genoese ships tried to venture beyond Crete, there were fierce battles. But in those days, Genoese and Venetian were the international languages, just as French and English are today. (p. 40)”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Three cultures intertwined in Brassens: Central European, with the waltz, French, with the java, and Neapolitan, with the tarantella [...]. That's why my first songs were based on those rhythms and that atmosphere. Then I was intrigued by the fact that he dealt with controversial issues of great social relevance, dismissing them and singing about them with the nonchalance of an English actor rather than a French one: because French actors are emphatic and declamatory, while English actors say terrifying things with a kind of icy indifference. Brassens, in short, was my great role model, even though, having had the opportunity, I always avoided meeting him in person: I needed to keep him as a myth; if this myth had collapsed upon meeting him, my world would have collapsed. So I preferred to imagine him only through his songs. (p. 43)”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(About his captors) [...] I can't say they scared me. I am more inclined to scrutinise other people's lives than my own, I am attracted to losers, I felt like an observer rather than a victim. I thought that they were the ones who were truly imprisoned, living with the same discomforts as us for a truly miserable wage [...]. Apart from my older songs such as “Il pescatore” and “Bocca di rosa”, they preferred those by Guccini. Once they begged Dori, in vain, to sing something for them. Songs I wrote later were inspired by their reflections, such as “Quello che non ho” (“What I don't have”), or by true stories they told me, such as “Franziska”. (p. 115)”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Writing songs in Italian is technically difficult because the requirements of metre mean you need a large number of truncated words, which do not exist in Italian, or at least are not abundant. At this point, in order to guarantee the aesthetic quality of the verse, you are forced to change the meaning of what you want to say. Genoese, on the other hand, is an agile language, and it is possible to find a truncated synonym that has the same meaning as the prose outline you have jotted down and then translated into verse, since ideas rarely come to you already organised metrically. This is a problem we Italians have, while the English and French do not, as their languages are much richer in truncated words, and writing in Genoese made it much easier to solve. (p. 136)”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dialects are idioms not imposed by authority, but invented by ethnic groups who had an urgent need to communicate: I say urgent, but in fact they had plenty of time to invent, to refine languages that increasingly resembled themselves and their surroundings. Perhaps it is not unreasonable to say that local languages resemble the places where they are spoken: thus, certain harshnesses that I find in the Aosta Valley dialect, which seem to respond to and echo the hardness of the surrounding mountain rocks, are softened in the Piedmontese dialect of the great plain, which sounds as sweet as the language of neighbouring France. Similarly, the stickiness of Ligurian, particularly Genoese, is not so far removed from the “'lepego”', the slipperiness of boat decks and piers. (p. 65)”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was the usual generous mother in the spectacularity of the oblique and changing landscapes, an affectionate mother in bestowing a Shangri-La climate, an extremely strict parent towards those who let themselves be lulled to sleep by the rhythm of her Mediterranean breath, always warm. That was the Genoa from which I separated myself due to a love affair, and we ended up growing apart. Two different subjects: she, cradling the children who had stayed at home, the favourite parishioners of the Sunday seafront or the rough altercations dressed as princes, dockers and purple-robed entrepreneurs; I, cultivating smoky Lombardies of boundless femininity. I was a former son, a bastard and forgotten by her, and she was for me a large blue apron, perfumed with marjoram, whose scent I would remember from time to time: in short, a city to be regretted. (pp. 83-84)”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(About Christopher Columbus) It seems to me that in Genoa there is a rather widespread attitude of astonished resignation, an attitude of contempt typical of us Genoese who, despite the clichés, are much more sensitive to moral criticism than we are to the glitter of coins. [...] All this has brought upon the innocent and astonished Genoa almost the shame of having given birth to a genius of navigation, a man who tended to be mild-mannered but who, in his mature years, made the grave mistake of putting the desire for glory and wealth before those ethical principles that no truly great man should ever fail to uphold, regardless of the historical period in which he lived. (pp. 97-98)”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Loneliness (its close relative, silence, must be learned to listen to. Silence does not exist) does not exist; in the sense that loneliness does not consist in being alone, but rather in not knowing how to keep oneself company. Those who do not know how to keep themselves company will find it difficult to keep others company. That is why you can be alone in the midst of a thousand people, and that is also why you can find yourself in your own company and be happy (for example, listening to silence, a close relative of solitude). But true silence does not exist, just as true solitude does not exist. Just surrender to the voices of the Universe.”
Fabrizio De André (1940–1999) said by 1999 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source