Federico Fellini Quotes

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

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

You have to live spherically - in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm - and things will come your way.

A different language is a different vision of life.

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.

Going to the cinema is like returning to the womb; you sit there, still and meditative in the darkness, waiting for life to appear on the screen.

The visionary is the only realist.

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.

Real religion should be something that liberates men. But churches don't want free men who can think for themself and find their own divinity within. When a religion becomes organized it is no longer a religious experience but only superstition and estrangement.

No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.

Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present.

What's 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. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.

Nothing is more honest than a dream.

One of the greatest handicaps is to fear a mistake. You have stopped yourself. You have to move freely into the arena, not just to wait for the perfect situation, the perfect moment... If you have to make a mistake, it's better to make a mistake of action than one of inaction. If I had the opportunity again, I would take chances.

Never trust a woman who doesn’t like to eat. She is probably lousy in bed.

I spent my life trying to cure myself of my education.

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

I never make moral judgments; I'm not qualified to do so. I am not a censor, a priest, or a politician.

Don't forget that costumes, like dreams, are symbolic communication. Dreams teach us that a language for everything exists - for every object, every color worn, every clothing detail. Hence, costumes provide an aesthetic objectification that helps to tell the character's story.

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.

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

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

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.

There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably.

Like many people, I have no religion, and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with the tide. I live in the doubts of my duty.... I think there is dignity in this, just to go on working.... Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history. We are waiting for something, perhaps another miracle, perhaps the Martians. Who knows?

All art is autobiographical.

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.

Don't tell me what I'm doing; I don't want to know.

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

The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set

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

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.

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

Fate is written in the face.

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

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

If I'm a cruel satirist at least I'm 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.

Freedom, especially a woman's freedom, is a conquest to be made, not a gift to be received. It isn't granted. It must be taken.

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.

I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.

Nothing is sadder than laughter; nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair.

Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train...But we must at least take them to the station...to a point of departure.

Marriage is a tyranny, a mortification of man's natural instincts. Man needs a multiplicity of relationships.

I claim the right to contradict myself. I don't want to deprive myself of the right to talk nonsense, and I ask humbly to be allowed to be wrong sometimes.

It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.

Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious.

For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions.

Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.