Top 100 Ingmar Bergman Quotes
#2. Actually it deals ("as usual" I was about to say!) with Life, Love and Death. Because nothing in fact is more important. To occupy oneself with. To think of. To worry over. To be happy about. And so on.
Ingmar Bergman
#3. There is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.
Ingmar Bergman
#4. Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.
Ingmar Bergman
#5. The film medium is some sort of magic. I think also it's a magic that every frame comes and stands still for a fraction of a second and then it darkens. A half part of the time when you see a picture you sit in complete darkness. Isn't that fascinating? That is magic.
Ingmar Bergman
#8. Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.
Ingmar Bergman
#9. I am normally afraid of birds and have never dreamt of any bird in my life.
Ingmar Bergman
#10. I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.
Ingmar Bergman
#11. DESIREE: Don't forget, Madame, that love is a perpetual juggling of three balls. Their names are heart, word and sex. How easily these three balls can be juggled, and how easily one of them can be dropped.
Ingmar Bergman
#13. To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated.
Ingmar Bergman
#14. 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.
Ingmar Bergman
#15. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure ...
Ingmar Bergman
#16. I think that for some time now I have been living with an anxiety which has had no tangible cause. It has been like having a toothache, without the conscientious dentist having been able to find anything wrong with the tooth or with the person as a whole.
Ingmar Bergman
#17. I think I'm Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can't imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I'm very Swedish - I don't dislike to be alone.
Ingmar Bergman
#18. I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.
Ingmar Bergman
#19. All of us collect fortunes when we are children. A fortune of colors, of lights, and darkness, of movement, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to his fortune when grown up.
Ingmar Bergman
#20. I think I have made just one picture that I really like ...
Ingmar Bergman
#21. You know I feel such tenderness for you. It's difficult to bear. I don't know what to do with my tenderness.
Ingmar Bergman
#22. For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.
Ingmar Bergman
#23. We make each other alive; it doesn't make a difference if it hurts.
Ingmar Bergman
#24. Sometimes, I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films.
Ingmar Bergman
#25. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
Ingmar Bergman
#26. I have such difficulty calming down - my stomach, my head, reality, everything. That is the reason I live in Faro.
Ingmar Bergman
#27. If I didn't have my profession, I think I would be sitting in a nuthouse. But I have been unceasingly at work, and this has been very healthy for me. So I had no need for therapy.
Ingmar Bergman
#28. When we came out from the Elysee palace, there was a gigantic limousine waiting for us and four police on motorcycles. It is probably one of the few times I have experienced my fame. I thought it was so fantastic that I laughed to the point of shouting.
Ingmar Bergman
#29. Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.
Ingmar Bergman
#30. From an early age onward, it was said that 'Ingmar has no sense of humor.'
Ingmar Bergman
#31. Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
Ingmar Bergman
#32. Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons.
Ingmar Bergman
#34. We always regret that we did not ask our parents more, really get to know them while they were alive.
Ingmar Bergman
#35. Writing is boring, very boring, and it takes so much patience.
Ingmar Bergman
#36. Well, we're grasping for two things at once. Partly for communion with others - that's the deepest instinct in us. And partly, we're seeking security. By constant communion with others we hope we shall be able to accept the horrible fact of our total solitude.
Ingmar Bergman
#38. I have a lot of tics and phobias. I hate to travel. I hate to go to festivals. I hate it when somebody gets close behind me. I'm scared of the darkness. I hate open doors.
Ingmar Bergman
#39. I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.
Ingmar Bergman
#40. You never know when I'm lying. So it would be more practical to believe what I say
-Pauline in In the Presence of a Clown
Ingmar Bergman
#41. I am conscious about myself and everything, and then suddenly, or slowly, my conscious fades out. Switches off. And it's not existing, and that's a marvelous feeling. That from existing, I am not existing. And at that moment, nothing can happen to me.
Ingmar Bergman
#43. Everyone likes happiness, no one likes pain. But you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.
Ingmar Bergman
#44. There are so many books I want to read. Difficult books. That's what I intend to do and what I'm longing for.
Ingmar Bergman
#45. I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.
Ingmar Bergman
#46. Death: When next we meet, the hour will strike for you and your friends.
Antonius Block: And will you reveal your secrets?
Death: I have no secrets.
Antonius Block: So do you know nothing?
Death: I am unknowing.
Ingmar Bergman
#47. To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe.
Ingmar Bergman
#48. 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.
Ingmar Bergman
#50. 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.
Ingmar Bergman
#51. I shall remember this moment: the silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries, the bowl of milk. Your faces in the evening light.[ ... ] I shall carry this memory carefully in my hands as if it were a bowl brimful of fresh milk. It will be a sign to me, and a great sufficiency.
Ingmar Bergman
#52. First, I write down all I know about the story, at length and in detail. Then I sink the iceberg and let some of it float up just a little.
Ingmar Bergman
#53. I could always live in my art but never in my life
Ingmar Bergman
#56. I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
Ingmar Bergman
#57. The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress.
Ingmar Bergman
#58. I'd prostitute my talents if it would further my cause, steal if there was no way out, killing my friends or anyone else if it would help my art.
Ingmar Bergman
#59. I was booed at the premiere of 'Miss Julie,' a remarkably stimulating experience.
Ingmar Bergman
#61. I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.
Ingmar Bergman
#62. Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits; perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently. You bear terrible thoughts; it is almost painful to be near you. At the same time it is enticing. Do you know why?
Ingmar Bergman
#63. My basic view of things is - not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer.
Ingmar Bergman
#64. I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me.
Ingmar Bergman
#65. One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)
Ingmar Bergman
#67. Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.
Ingmar Bergman
#68. There's always a tension in me between my urge to destroy and my will to live ... Every morning I wake up with a new wrath, a new suspiciousness, a new desire to live.
Ingmar Bergman
#69. Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace.
Ingmar Bergman
#71. 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.
Ingmar Bergman
#72. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.
Ingmar Bergman
#73. The anger and the creativity are so closely intertwined with me, and there's plenty of anger left.
Ingmar Bergman
#74. 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.
Ingmar Bergman
#75. Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.
Ingmar Bergman
#76. Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God.
Ingmar Bergman
#77. This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously?
Ingmar Bergman
#78. When you finish a film, you never want to see it again.
Ingmar Bergman
#79. 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.'
Ingmar Bergman
#80. I know, of course, that by using film we can bring in other previously unknown worlds, realities beyond reality.
Ingmar Bergman
#81. Mother was actually a great doer and organizer. All the special occasions were directed by mother.
Ingmar Bergman
#82. We didn't know that Mother had gone through a passionate love affair or that Father suffered from severe depression. Mother was preparing to break out of her marriage, Father threatening to take his own life.
Ingmar Bergman
#83. I was a very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today I'd say, 'You're very talented and I'll try to help you, but I don't want anything else to do with you.
Ingmar Bergman
#84. Old age is like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become, but your views become more extensive.
Ingmar Bergman
#85. A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.
Ingmar Bergman
#86. 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.
Ingmar Bergman
#87. The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.
Ingmar Bergman
#88. 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.
Ingmar Bergman
#89. Reality is perhaps not at all what I imagine. Perhaps it doesn't exist, in fact. Perhaps it only exists as a longing.
Ingmar Bergman
#90. I feel very strongly that I'm surrounded by other realities.
Ingmar Bergman
#91. We worked on 'Fanny and Alexander' for seven months and it was an amusing production. Still, it was very long and heavy and so awfully complicated, .. And when the premiere was over and everything went well, I thought, 'That's that.' .
Ingmar Bergman
#92. I'm very, very lazy. I love to sit in a chair and look out the window and do nothing.
Ingmar Bergman
#93. My pictures are always part of my thinking, and my emotions, tensions, dreams, desires.
Ingmar Bergman
#95. They said you were mentally healthy, but your madness is the worst
Ingmar Bergman
#96. I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry ... and miserable. I think it's awful.
Ingmar Bergman
#98. Now I want to make it plain that 'The Virgin Spring' must be regarded as an aberration. It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa.
Ingmar Bergman
#100. In 'The Serpent's Egg,' I created a Berlin which no one recognized, not even I.
Ingmar Bergman
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