Quotes by Federico Fellini

“There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.”

“A different language is a different vision of life.”

“I discovered that whats really important for a creator isnt what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, whats 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. Its not what we say but how we say it that matters.”

“You exist only in what you do.”

“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.”

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

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oysters autobiography”

“Censorship is advertising paid by the government.”

“A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.”

“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 Reapers scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.”

“Experience is what you get while looking for something else.”

“I dont 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 theres one thing thats dangerous for an artist, its precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and the rest of it.”

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

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

“God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.”

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

“Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you cant teach old fleas new dogs.”

“When you live with another person for 50 years, all of your memories are invested in that person, like a bank account of shared memories. It’s not that you refer to them constantly. In fact, for people who do not live in the past, you almost never say, “Do you remember that night we...?” But you don’t have to. That is the best of all. You know that the other person does remember. Thus, the past is part of the present as long as the other person lives. It is better than any scrapbook, because you are both living scrapbooks.”

“If Im a cruel satirist at least Im 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.”

“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.”