I want to stop. I want to stay on Fårö, and read the books I haven’t read, find out things I haven’t yet found out. I want to write things I haven’t written. To listen to music, and talk to my neighbors. To live together with my wife a very calm, very secure, very lazy existence, for the rest of my life.

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

My basic view of things is - not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer.

Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it's gone.

We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.

When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.

One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)