Federico Fellini Quotes (31 Quotes)


    Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.

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

    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?

    The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

    When you live with another person for 50 years, all of your memories are invested in that person, like a bank account of shared memories. Its not that you refer to them constantly. In fact, for people who do not live in the past, you almost never say, Do you remember that night we... But you dont have to. That is the best of all. You know that the other person does remember. Thus, the past is part of the present as long as the other person lives. It is better than any scrapbook, because you are both living scrapbooks.


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


    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.

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


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

    A sign of growing old is when interviewers start asking you, What would you do differently if you had your life to live over again I give some sort of answer because I dont wish to be rude, but I dont tell them the image that comes into my mind because they would think it vain and frivolous, and no one wants to be a subject for ridicule. I see myself as a tall, skinny Fellini, vigorously lifting weights. Thats what I would do differently. I would lift weights.


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

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

    Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

    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.

    Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

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

    What is an artist A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between . . . this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one -- which is really the realm of the artist.

    Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.

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

    Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can't teach old fleas new dogs.

    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.

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

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

    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


    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 Borgese on a daily basis.

    I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, 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.



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