Words matter. These are the best Federico Fellini Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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 the rest of it.
It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.
All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.
Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.
To people of my generation, the picture show was really another dimension – sensual, whimsical. No uniforms or collective rites, but a place where little boys like me could laugh and feel free.
A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.
The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.
Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you’ve made is worth the misery of having to review it.
I am not the kind of director who sits in a chair smoking a cigar talking with a microphone to 10 assistants. I need to move. To touch. To put a painting on a wall. To arrange a set.
I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.
God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.
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.
Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.
A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
Through the ages, from the beginning of time, I’m certain man has covered woman’s face with masks. They are, however, his masks, not hers.
My work has always been the thing that justifies my life.
Experience is what you get while looking for something else.
No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.
When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every day. I put in what occurs to me that day out of my imagination. You start on a voyage; you know where you will end up but not what will occur along the way. You want to be surprised.
If you do what you were born to do, I think you will never grow old.
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?
Fate is written in the face.
I’d like very much to make a confident picture. I would like to be as good as nature, which, with a shower, produces flowers and grass to cover the destruction. But we are surrounded by human fragmentation, by pessimism, and it is difficult to talk of other things.
All artists are equal when they are themselves.
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.
I did not realise that I was so loved. It can’t just be for the films. I must have done something else, but I can’t remember what.
Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.
You exist only in what you do.
Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
I do not need a producer. I need only a good production manager. I need only a man who will give me money.
