Quotes by Federico Fellini

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.

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.

When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don’t matter to you; you don’t bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.

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

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

I’m a liar, but an honest one. People reproach me for not always telling the same story in the same way. But this happens because I’ve invented the whole tale from the start and it seems boring to me and unkind to other people to repeat myself.

No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. Its the most important thing.

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.

Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borgess work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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. Its a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.

A different language is a different vision of life.

You exist only in what you do.

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