Federico Fellini Quotes

For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions.

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present.

What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious.

Marriage, if it is to survive, must be treated as the beginning, not as the happy ending.

Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you've made is worth the misery of having to review it.

The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set

According to the doctors, I'm only suffering from a light form of premature baldness.

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.

Fate is written in the face.

Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear, the same self-doubts . . . and I have only one source on which I can draw, because it comes from within me.

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.

There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably.

A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.

A creator always needs excuses.

Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train...But we must at least take them to the station...to a point of departure.

Marriage is a tyranny, a mortification of man's natural instincts. Man needs a multiplicity of relationships.

I claim the right to contradict myself. I don't want to deprive myself of the right to talk nonsense, and I ask humbly to be allowed to be wrong sometimes.

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

Nothing is sadder than laughter; nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair.

Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.

Don't forget that costumes, like dreams, are symbolic communication. Dreams teach us that a language for everything exists - for every object, every color worn, every clothing detail. Hence, costumes provide an aesthetic objectification that helps to tell the character's story.

Never trust a woman who doesn’t like to eat. She is probably lousy in bed.

You see me in my most virile moment when you see me doing what I do. When I am directing, a special energy comes upon me. ... It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive. It is like having sex.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

I even see the cinema itself as a woman, with its alternation of light and darkness, of appearing and disappearing images

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

Nothing is more honest than a dream.

A different language is a different vision of life.

Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there, still and meditative in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen.

We can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we’re faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off.

Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.

As a writer and director, I want to know what is behind the good manners and soft voice. Who is inside the silhouette?

It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.

Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.

No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.

You have to live spherically - in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm - and things will come your way.

I spent my life trying to cure myself of my education.

As I don't consider myself exceptional, but simply a storyteller, each of my stories is really a period of my life. Deep down I feel that criticism of my work-which is the most sincere and authentic vision of myself-is unsuitable and immodest, whether it is favorable or unfavorable.

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provided they come close together.

Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.