Federico Fellini Quotes - Page 3

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.

The greatest danger for artists is total freedom.

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?

When the most important times are occurring, we don't even recognize them or notice. We are just busy living our lives. Only looking back do we know what was a great moment in our lives.

The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.

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

The beauty of life are women, no one loves them as much as me. I adore them all, the ugly, the beautiful, the cold, the sexy and especially those that are from cinema material, shadow and light.

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

All art is autobiographical.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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