I was blessed with a sense of my own destiny. I have never sold myself short. I have never judged myself by other people’s standards. I have always e… - Sophia Loren

As time passed there was no more buying food, no money, no supplies. On some days, we wouldn’t even have a crumb to eat. There’s a vivid scene in Nanni Loy’s The Four Days of Naples, a movie made after the war about the uprising of the Neapolitans against the occupying Germans, in which one of the young characters sinks his teeth into a loaf of bread so voraciously, so desperately, I can still identify with him. In those four famous days in late September, when Naples rose up against the Germans — even before the Allies arrived, it was the climax of a terrible period of deprivation and marked the beginning of the end of the war in Italy.

Not at first. She was against new things. She thought I would never be successful, and that was wrong, she was wrong. Later she started to believe that I could maybe be somebody. But it was always a big maybe. To her, the life that I wanted, it was all a dream. And she didn’t believe in dreams.

You must all, somewhere deep in your hearts, believe that you have a special beauty that is like no other and that is so valuable that you must not abandon it. Indeed, you must learn to cherish it.