Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Federico Fellini - Page 2

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

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

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.

All art is autobiographical.

Freedom, especially a woman's freedom, is a conquest to be made, not a gift to be received. It isn't granted. It must be taken.

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.

The greatest danger for artists is total freedom.

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

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.

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.

When the most important times are occurring, we don't even recognize them or notice. We are just busy living our lives. Only looking back do we know what was a great moment in our lives.

Georgian film is a completely unique phenomenon, vivid, philosophically inspiring, very wise, childlike. There is everything that can make me cry and I ought to say that it (my crying) is not an easy thing.

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.

Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism.

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.

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

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

I always direct the same film. I can't distinguish one from the other.

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.

When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity...I can be sure that I am right.

We must get beyond passions, like a great work of art. In such miraculous harmony. We should learn to love each other so much to live outside of time... detached.

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

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.

The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all — that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open — has disappeared. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?

Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.

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.

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

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.

If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm not a hyprocrite: I never judge what other people do. Neither a politician nor a priest, I never censor what others do. Neither a philospher nor a psychiatrist, I never bother trying to analyze or resolve my fears and neuroses.

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

The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borghese on a daily basis.

The beauty of life are women, no one loves them as much as me. I adore them all, the ugly, the beautiful, the cold, the sexy and especially those that are from cinema material, shadow and light.

I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.

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.

No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

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

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

There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that's a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography. (Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)