Quotes from Isabella Rossellini

I would love to be a field biologist. I would love to do what Jane Goodall did, just totally immerse myself in the life of one specific species for years and study every aspect of its behavior until little by little, all of these patterns become clear. That would be great, but I don't know if I have it left in me.

There are so many spiders, and their rituals, their mating rituals, their courtship ritual, can be very, very different.

Although Dorothy in Blue Velvet was humiliated and hurt by men, basically I could react to how she felt.

It's a new business for me to be a filmmaker.

It always amazed me that people believed I was this beautiful object.

I grew up in Italy, and our country is a country of great agriculture and food produce. It wasn't like I was urban and only knew about high-heeled shoes and purses and never knew where my eggs came from.

Many years in New York has made me urban, and I won't eat my chicken because I met him personally!

I live in New York, and the only live animals you see are cockroaches, rats and pigeons, which I admire immensely. When I see an animal that thrives in the garbage, I feel relief; in our urban environment, other animals are dying out.

I never really think about what I have to do to stick to my image. I just follow what I like to do. Sometimes it's glamorous, sometimes it's not.

Mammals are very close to us, but bugs are strange. They're more mysterious and exotic.

I grew up in a family of filmmakers, so I always wanted to make films about animals, especially comical films. Something about animals amuses me. And they have a great mystery. It's the same mystique some people might feel looking at the stars or the ocean.

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.

I wanted to make a film about my dad, a sort of love letter, and explain what I understood of his cinema, which was so utopian. I also wanted to give the sense of his cinema, because they have never been very big box-office, but they were very influential.

People use mobile phones in this very distracting environment where you probably don't have time to watch a 30-minute film, but you might have time to look at a film for a minute and learn something you didn't expect while you walk on the streets.

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.

Every time you work, it's a new film, and generally when you work with auteurs, people that write and direct their films, there's always an originality.

Most people divorce because one in the couple falls in love with someone else: it's a common cause of divorce. I still think that it's tinted - this is my opinion - with a veil of racism and American puritanism.

There is this idea that you have to play heroines or women who succeed.

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science.

Adoption has the dimension of connection — not only to your own tribe, but beyond, widening the scope of what constitutes love, ties and family. It is a larger embrace. By adopting, we stretch past our immediate circles and, by reaching out, find an unexpected sense of belonging with others.

I believe in a set of values I cannot live by. I set high goals for myself, I seek perfection, dream of exotic faraway places. But ultimately, what I long for isn't far away at all. It's in my own backyard. Imperfection charms me, familiar things move me... a celebration of what we have, instead of what we long for. That for me, is glamor.

When I took my clothes off in Blue Velvet , I wanted to convey the brutality of sex abuse. I wanted to look like a quartered cow hanging in a butcher shop as well as disturbingly appealing.

I loved my career as a model, and that evolved into being an actress.