Top 33 Ingmar Bergman Quotes

I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can’t for a moment be equal to the suffering you’ve caused.

I hate to travel. I don’t go anywhere.

Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons.

I was booed at the premiere of ‘Miss Julie,’ a remarkably stimulating experience.

My pictures are always part of my thinking, and my emotions, tensions, dreams, desires.

If I let myself go, nothing will get done.

I have a feeling of complete balance. The sea, the house, the loneliness, the light. Everything is clearer. Much more precise. I have the feeling that I am living on a limit, and I’m crossing that limit sometimes.

I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it’s because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being ‘arranged.’

I make all my decisions on intuition.

My education was very tough.

The doors between the old man today and the child are still open, wide open. I can stroll through my grandmother’s house and know exactly where the pictures are, the furniture was, how it looked, the voice, the smells. I can move from my bed at night today to my childhood in less than a second.

I was bloody ill-tempered when I was young.

I have always appreciated the honest brutality of the international film world. One need never doubt one’s worth in the market. Mine was zero.

In ‘The Serpent’s Egg,’ I created a Berlin which no one recognized, not even I.

There is something joyous about not talking.

Sometimes, I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films.

Life wasn’t about freeing up human souls. It was about creating obedient slaves in the hierarchical construction of the society – with God at the top, then the king and then the father.

I am forever living in my childhood.

I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.

I have such difficulty calming down – my stomach, my head, reality, everything. That is the reason I live in Faro.

People ask what are my intentions with my films – my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct.

When you’re as chaotic as I am, you need a very firm structure in your life.

When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.

I am normally afraid of birds and have never dreamt of any bird in my life.

The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times, and create panic and terror. But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage.

I am very much aware of my own double self. The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work – he is in touch with the child. He is not rational; he is impulsive and extremely emotional.

Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven’t thought about death.

I was very much in love with my mother. She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.

I dream about doing a film about once a week.

For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.

I’m very, very lazy. I love to sit in a chair and look out the window and do nothing.

From an early age onward, it was said that ‘Ingmar has no sense of humor.’

The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny each other’s existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.