Top 100 Bergman's Quotes
#2. When I was first exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, I found them frank and disturbing portraits of the world we live in, but that was not something that displeased me. They were beautiful. I thought people would respond to my plays the way I responded to Bergman's films.
Wallace Shawn
#3. If a face like Ingrid Bergman's looks at you as though you're adorable, everybody does. You don't have to act very much.
Humphrey Bogart
#4. I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#5. I don't want him to know that people like Louis's mom exist, that people fall into land mines of pain and can't crawl back out.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
#6. 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
#7. Nothing's forever forever's a lie. All we have is what's between hello and goodbye.
Marilyn Bergman
#8. 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
#9. We're too busy busting whorehouses or solving murders. That's what makes the show so funny
Jaime Bergman
#10. Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it's gone.
Ingmar Bergman
#11. My role, or anyone's role in network news, is to make the person on camera look good. You don't do that, you don't work there.
Lowell Bergman
#12. It's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it.
Ingmar Bergman
#13. One bright pansy popping through a sidewalk crack will get weeded or stepped on; it's not until twenty fabulous flowers bust through and the pavement is ruined anyway that someone decides maybe it isn't a sidewalk at all, but a flower garden. So please, for the love of gender
go bloom.
S. Bear Bergman
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil - or perhaps a saint - out of stone.
Ingmar Bergman
#18. Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior.
Eric Kandel
#19. 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
#20. Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen ... But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He's like a miner digging in search of purity.
Bertrand Tavernier
#21. Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.
Rod Serling
#22. And at the risk of answering the same question the same way over and over: it's not a fucking binary. It would be easier for a lot of people if it were, but it just bloody well ain't, and nothing any of us does can make it that way. Please take a deep breath. Or,
S. Bear Bergman
#23. 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
#24. I'm an incurable romantic, and Casablanca's one of the most romantic pictures I've ever seen - the combination of Bogart and Bergman is just magical.
Ken Adam
#25. 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
#26. I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.
Ingmar Bergman
#27. 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
#28. In 'The Serpent's Egg,' I created a Berlin which no one recognized, not even I.
Ingmar Bergman
#29. There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it over.
John W. Bergman
#30. 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
#31. I've never sought success in order to get fame and money; it's the talent and the passion that count in success.
Ingrid Bergman
#32. I have a whole set of problem-solving behaviors and I am anxious to use them, in much the same way that I would stand up on the train to give my seat to someone who seems to need it more than I do: here is something I can address, and I do, and all is well.
S. Bear Bergman
#33. Nothing has topped the way men shake her hand and look her in the eye, what it's like to call a man chickenshit to his face and get away with it, to mean it, to feel free and dominant and in control of your life.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
#34. 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
#35. It's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
Gregory Corso
#36. One of ennui's most terribel components is the overwhelming feeling of ennui that comes over you whenever you try to explain it.
Ingmar Bergman
#37. 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
#38. It is not whether you really cry. It's whether the audience thinks you are crying.
Ingrid Bergman
#39. The first time an autograph hunter told me, 'You are my mother's favorite actress,' I aged twenty years.
Ingrid Bergman
#40. 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
#41. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.
Ingmar Bergman
#42. What has been adjudicated and established in the wake of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement is the ability of the press to basically write or broadcast almost anything about the government. There's very few restrictions in that way.
Lowell Bergman
#43. 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.
Ingmar Bergman
#44. (On Ingrid Bergman) "I didn't do anything I've never done before, but when the camera moves in on that Bergman face, and she's saying she loves you, it would make anybody feel romantic."
Humphrey Bogart
#45. There's nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh.
Ingrid Bergman
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. When people speak admiringly of a butch, what I see is someone who has taken on the best gendered characteristics of both woman and man, left a lot of the stuff born of misogyny and heterosexism behind, and walked forward into the world without apology.
S. Bear Bergman
#49. The anger and the creativity are so closely intertwined with me, and there's plenty of anger left.
Ingmar Bergman
#50. Worrying about parents is a waste of time. It's your life. Let's have a martini.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
#51. So please, for the love of gender- go bloom. Or water someone else while they do.
S. Bear Bergman
#52. I am doing the best I can. I am hoping I am good enough. I am holding you close, as close as I can, hand cradling your head and breath on your hair, my whole body curved around yours, sheltering you as best I can, trying to remember that I cannot keep you safe, but I can keep you loved.
S. Bear Bergman
#53. A kiss is a secret told to the mouth instead of the ear; kisses are the messengers of love and tenderness.
Ingrid Bergman
#54. An Ingmar Bergman film would probably owe a sizeable bulk of its import and its direction and its quality to the directorial end and to the director because it's uniquely a Bergman film. But that again is not the general - no, that's much more the exception than the rule.
Rod Serling
#57. 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
#58. This man (Bergman) is one of the few film directors-perhaps the only one in the world-to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#59. Only he who is well prepared has any opportunity to improvise.
Ingmar Bergman
#60. You know, when people talk about filmmaking and the techniques of filmmaking, we use them all the time in network television news in order to make our stories simpler, tighter and more understandable to the general public.
Lowell Bergman
#61. Growing older is like climbing a mountain: the higher you get, the more strength you need, but the further you see.
Ingmar Bergman
#62. 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
#63. I do not know how to kiss or I would kiss you. Where do the noses go?
Ingrid Bergman
#64. 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
#65. When you are not practicing, remember somewhere someone is practicing, and when you meet him, he will win.
Peter Bergman
#67. Sara: As professor emeritus, you ought to know why it hurts. But you don't know.
Sara: You know so much, and you don't know anything.
Ingmar Bergman
#68. When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.
Ingmar Bergman
#69. Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.
Ingmar Bergman
#70. Dolly was the exclamation point in my life. She made me feel things: adoration, anger, frustration. She was always in love and it made her glow.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
#71. I was the shyest human ever invented, but I had a lion inside me that wouldn't shut up!
Ingrid Bergman
#72. I realized that a lot of the great directors that I admire from [Ingmar] Bergman to [Fredrico] Fellini re always shooting, then going into the editing room, and shooting again.
Marc Forster
#73. I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.
Ingmar Bergman
#74. 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
#77. The best way to keep young is to keep going in whatever it is that keeps you going. With me that's work, and a lot of it. And when a job is finished, relax and have fun.
Ingrid Bergman
#78. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure ...
Ingmar Bergman
#80. 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
#81. 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
#83. I spent almost 3 months with Bergman, four hours every afternoon. We sat and went through the whole script. To be honest, most of the time we talked about life and other different things. It was really a wonderful time.
Bille August
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. I wanted, then, to become what I most admired, what now seemed most real to me. I wanted to be that exalted, complicated presence in someone's life, the familiar body, the source of another's existence. But I knew what I wanted was not always what I needed.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
#88. I want to mother the world, I thought. I have so much love.
Then - I have no business being a mother. I am a selfish woman.
Then - I can do this. Millions of women have been mothers.
Then - I feel very alone. I do not know what I'm capable of.
Megan Mayhew Bergman
#89. I am so 100 percent Swedish ... Someone has said a Swede is like a bottle of ketchup - nothing and nothing and then all at once - splat. I think I'm a little like that.
Ingmar Bergman
#90. In every species of fish I've angled for, it is the ones that have got away that thrill me the most, the ones that keep fresh in my memory. So I say it is good to lose fish. If we didn't, much of the thrill of angling would be gone.
Ray Bergman
#92. On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against.
Ingmar Bergman
#93. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.
Ingmar Bergman
#94. Bergman has a very special eye for people. His background taught him to listen and to feel.
Max Von Sydow
#95. I am normally afraid of birds and have never dreamt of any bird in my life.
Ingmar Bergman
#96. Just give the Italians a chance for drama and they take it with both hands.
Ingrid Bergman
#97. 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
#98. You can't expect that because you find a story and report it out that your newspaper and broadcasting company is going to want to publish and broadcast it - and you're going to be a hero.
Lowell Bergman
#99. There are only seven movie stars in the world whose name alone will induce American bankers to lend money for movie productions, and the only woman on the list is Ingrid Bergman.
Cary Grant
#100. As students of the silver screen recall, Bogart's admonition about future regret led Bergman to board the plane and fly away with her husband. Had she stayed with Bogey in Casablanca, she would probably have felt just fine. Not right away, perhaps, but soon, and for the rest of her life.
Daniel M. Gilbert
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
