123 Quotes by Isabella Rossellini

But my mother loved The Elephant Man, and my father gave David Lynch a scholarship to study in Rome.

I didn't want to become an actress because the competition with my mother would have been to much to live up to.

To be an icon is a big job - it's beyond acting. And sometimes it pays, and sometimes it doesn't.

Food is a big part of my culture, so everyone knows how to cook. When I came to America and asked a babysitter to softboil an egg for my son and she didn't know how, I was shocked.

I graduated from Academy of Fashion and Costume Design in Rome. At first, I thought I was going to be a costume designer for films, and then I ended up working in fashion - not as a designer, but mostly as a model.

One of the great issues in biology is the origin of altruism - of why you would do something for someone else that could hurt you - and Darwin posited that it might be rooted in maternal instinct, in sacrificing yourself for your children.

When I grew up in Italy in the 1950s, it was still very agricultural. Food was very important; produce was very important. Everyone made their own olive oil. It took me a long time after I moved here to understand that Americans are much further away from their food.

Market research shows that older women like seeing older women in ads, and that younger women do, too - because they see them and are not frightened of growing older.

When David left me I became totally brokenhearted.