Federico Fellini quotes

A different language is a different vision of life.
-- Federico Fellini

#Life #Work #Communication

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.
-- Federico Fellini

#Life #Positive #Football

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.
-- Federico Fellini

#Movie #Art #Believe

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

#Movie #Gambling #Would Be

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.
-- Federico Fellini

#Food #Cooking #Magic

It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.
-- Federico Fellini

#Faithful #Being Faithful #Easier

I spent my life trying to cure myself of my education.
-- Federico Fellini

#Trying #Cures

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Waiting #Darkness #Cinema

You exist only in what you do.
-- Federico Fellini

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Life #Art #Passion

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

#Childhood #Important #Matter

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

#Bed #Never Trust #Never Trust A Woman

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

#Positive #Expectations #Mind

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

#Work #Alive #Feels

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.
-- Federico Fellini

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Reality #Fire #Rose

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Art #Believe #Inspiration

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

#Sweet Love #Self #Gains

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

#Silence #Acting #Crafts

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

#Relaxation #Enthusiasm #Way

Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.
-- Federico Fellini

#Real #Lines #Bad Word

I think television has betrayed the meaning of democratic speech, adding visual chaos to the confusion of voices. What role does silence have in all this noise?
-- Federico Fellini

#Thinking #Voice #Confusion

Nothing is more honest than a dream.
-- Federico Fellini

#Dream #Honest

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Change #Time #Sometimes

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

#Suffering #Age

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

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

#Film #Direct

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
-- Federico Fellini

#Dream #Real #Mean

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

#Imagination #Literature #Comic

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

#Beautiful #Uplifting #Laughter

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Business #Inspiration #People

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
-- Federico Fellini

#People #Judging #Hypocrisy

All art is autobiographical.
-- Federico Fellini

#Art #Artist #Art Is

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

#Regret #Past #Waste

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

#Cynical #Innocence #Purity

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

#Life Is #Miserable #Existence

Don't tell me what I'm doing; I don't want to know.
-- Federico Fellini

#Ignorance #Want #Willful Ignorance

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

#Hype #Awkward #Misery

God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.
-- Federico Fellini

#Play #May #Dice

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.
-- Federico Fellini

#Government #Censorship #Advertising

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

#Thinking #Genius #Excellent

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

#Art #World #Fantasy

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Wise #Unique #Vivid

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Art #Memories #Style

The visionary is the only realist.
-- Federico Fellini

#Hipster #Visionaries #Realist

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

#Dictator #Stills

An artist is 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. That is the realm of the artist.
-- Federico Fellini

#Country #Artist #Reality

One of the greatest handicaps is to fear a mistake. You have stopped yourself. You have to move freely into the arena, not just to wait for the perfect situation, the perfect moment... If you have to make a mistake, it's better to make a mistake of action than one of inaction. If I had the opportunity again, I would take chances.
-- Federico Fellini

#Motivational #Mistake #Moving

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Art #Perspective #Cinema

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Children #Eye #Race

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?
-- Federico Fellini

#Thinking #People #Waiting

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Religious #Real #Men

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Sex #Special #Energy

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Self #Doubt #Source

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

#Light #Darkness #Cinema

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#People #Departure #Duty

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
-- Federico Fellini

#Art #Oysters #Pearls

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

#Together #Film #Opening

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Pain #Law #Imagination

Money is everywhere, but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
-- Federico Fellini

#Poet

I never make moral judgments; I'm not qualified to do so. I am not a censor, a priest, or a politician.
-- Federico Fellini

#Moral #Censorship #Judgment

A creator always needs excuses.
-- Federico Fellini

#Needs #Excuse #Creator

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

#Voice #Good Man #Directors

I think that one can have luck if one tries to create an atmosphere of spontaneity.
-- Federico Fellini

#Thinking #Atmosphere #Luck

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Mean #Dark #Reality

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

#Spontaneity #Explanation

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?
-- Federico Fellini

#Dream #Eye #Dark

Fate is written in the face.
-- Federico Fellini

#Fate #Faces

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.
-- Federico Fellini

#Vision #Criticism #Stories

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

#Writing #Thinking #Film

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.
-- Federico Fellini

#Imagination