Top 100 Fellini's Quotes
#1. That's what I always loved about [Federico] Fellini's films: You see the weird joy of the weird filmmaking family and the abstract craziness that goes along with it, and there's something about it that's quite beautiful.
Tim Burton
#2. When the film was presented in New York, the distributor reproduced the fountain scene on a billboard as high as a skyscraper. My name was in the middle in huge letters, Fellini's was at the bottom, very tiny. Now the name of Fellini has become very great, mine very little.
Anita Ekberg
#3. Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.
Federico Fellini
#4. There are beauty icons that I can never be like, sorta like a Gena Rowlands - I'll never have that look. I love Giulietta Masina, the great Fellini actress. But I'm probably more Seymour Cassel. Or somewhere between Lou Reed and Nora Ephron?
Natasha Lyonne
#5. In a sense, 'Schmidt' is the most Omaha of my films. But have I gotten it right? I'm not sure. Did Fellini get Rome right? Did Ozu get Tokyo right?
Alexander Payne
#6. I was influenced by European movies, old Fellini, old Kurosawa - any sort of foreign film.
Ted Demme
#7. Only the early Fitzgerald was great. Then came an orgy of brutal realism
Federico Fellini
#9. An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between that I'm calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.
Federico Fellini
#10. I have a profound admiration for Fellini. I met him lately and he's just fantastic. I feel very close to him even though he's very Italian. But his films could have been made in every country. When I say, I feel close to him, then also because we're both born on January 20th.
David Lynch
#11. No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.
Federico Fellini
#12. The cinematic language and interior destiny of each Iranian film-maker is different. The international influences on them vary from Rossellini to Fellini, Akira Kurosawa to Hou Hsiao-hsien, but there is a strong sense of solidarity.
Tariq Ali
#13. Nothing is sadder than laughter; nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair.
Federico Fellini
#14. The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.
Federico Fellini
#15. Julia edged closer, wondering what kind of vocabulary dogs understood. Frederico Fellini, her cat, was an intellectual and she could talk about books and films to him, as long as it was after he'd been fed, and fed well. She had the vague notion that dogs preferred football and politics.
Lisa Marie Rice
#16. 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.
Federico Fellini
#17. Rome is a very loony city in every respect. One needs but spend an hour or two there to realize that Fellini makes documentaries.
Fran Lebowitz
#18. You have to live spherically - in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm - and things will come your way.
Federico Fellini
#19. 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.
Federico Fellini
#20. I think about a Richard Avedon photo series, the kind of faces he gets of real people, which I find so captivating. Fellini was also great in filling his films with this ambiance, this environment, sometimes chaotic and carnival-like, but people's faces were always amazing.
Cary Fukunaga
#21. Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
Federico Fellini
#22. With 'Brick' there was the Dashiell Hammett influence, and with 'Brothers Bloom' there was a really strong Fellini influence - both those movies wore that on their sleeve.
Rian Johnson
#23. A more miserable life is better...believe me..than an existence protected by an organized society...where everything is calculated....where everything is perfect...
Frederico Fellini
#24. I always direct the same film. I can't distinguish one from the other.
Federico Fellini
#25. It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.
Federico Fellini
#26. Most movies shot in Italian don't even bother to record the sound. In fact, sometimes when Fellini works, he doesn't even know what the dialogue is going to be, and he simply has his characters count from 1 to 10, knowing he will loop in their dialogue later.
Sean Connery
#27. 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.
Federico Fellini
#28. We can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we're faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off.
Federico Fellini
#29. Marriage is a tyranny, a mortification of man's natural instincts. Man needs a multiplicity of relationships.
Federico Fellini
#30. 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.
Federico Fellini
#32. The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set
Federico Fellini
#33. 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.
Federico Fellini
#34. 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.
Federico Fellini
#35. 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
#36. It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.
Federico Fellini
#37. A face, he believes, is a piece of sculpture that has taken a lifetime to mold, so it tells more than any actor's technique possibly could. I've watched Fellini work, and he did
Elia Kazan
#38. I like so many different directors: Scorsese, Coppola, Cassavetes, Jarmusch, Gus van Sant, Woody Allen and the greats like Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky and among current filmmakers von Trier, Ang Lee, Wong Kar-wai.
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
#39. 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.
Federico Fellini
#41. For me, Fellini was like a watermelon. It is there. A watermelon cannot die.
Roberto Benigni
#43. 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.
Federico Fellini
#44. According to the doctors, I'm only suffering from a light form of premature baldness.
Federico Fellini
#48. Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.
Federico Fellini
#49. There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.
Federico Fellini
#51. When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity ... I can be sure that I am right.
Federico Fellini
#52. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.
Federico Fellini
#53. The films I liked were European films-Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut.
Tobe Hooper
#54. Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.
Federico Fellini
#55. As a writer and director, I want to know what is behind the good manners and soft voice. Who is inside the silhouette?
Federico Fellini
#56. I loved all movies, literally. I certainly loved 'Shane' and 'Roxie Hart.' Later on, when I was less of a kid, I loved 'L'Avventura' and 'Persona' and all Fellini movies and like everybody else I loved John Ford. Then and now, I loved Preston Sturges, maybe above anyone.
Mike Nichols
#57. Your life is a Fellini film, lacking only Anita Ekberg with a cat on her head.
Camille Paglia
#58. 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. One should go to the cinema with the innocence of a fetus
Federico Fellini
#59. Experience is what you get while looking for something else.
Federico Fellini
#62. There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably.
Federico Fellini
#63. If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet ... maybe we could understand something.
Federico Fellini
#64. 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?
Federico Fellini
#65. 'La Notte' is my favorite of the Antonioni pictures and my favorite work of the master cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo, who also shot '8 1/2' for Fellini.
Jake Paltrow
#66. I could spend my whole life photographing circuses. They combine everything I'm interested in - they're ironic, poetic, and corny at the same time. There's also something about a circus that's magical, sentimental, and almost tragic, like a Fellini film.
Mary Ellen Mark
#67. 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.
Federico Fellini
#68. I think we're [me and my son] different. He plans, organizes and intellectualizes more than I do. It wasn't until I worked with Federico Fellini that I understood what my problem was.
Donald Sutherland
#69. 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.
Federico Fellini
#70. Never trust a woman who doesn't like to eat. She is probably lousy in bed.
Federico Fellini
#71. 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.
Federico Fellini
#72. I never make moral judgments; I'm not qualified to do so. I am not a censor, a priest, or a politician.
Federico Fellini
#73. Happiness is simply a temporary condition that proceeds unhappiness. Fortunately for us, it works the other way around as well. But it's all a part of the carnival, isn't it?
Federico Fellini
#74. If you're not [Federico] Fellini you might make something very vulgar. Animation made it possible to maintain unity with all these different narratives.
Marjane Satrapi
#75. 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
#76. With Fellini, the fear dropped out of my work because it was such a happy experience ... hanging out with Fellini, having pasta on the set with Fellini, and going out with Fellini!
Terence Stamp
#77. When I first saw a Fellini movie, I came out of the movie theatre and decided to become a lawyer! I thought to myself, it's impossible to make something so beautiful!
Roberto Benigni
#80. All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
Federico Fellini
#81. My favorite favorites are people like Bunuel, Fellini and Charlie Chaplin.
Alex Winter
#82. I'm a liar, but an honest one. People reproach me for not always telling the same story in the same way. But this happens because I've invented the whole tale from the start and it seems boring to me and unkind to other people to repeat myself.
Federico Fellini
#83. Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present.
Federico Fellini
#85. 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
Federico Fellini
#86. My star was kind of fading towards the end of the '60s and suddenly I got this call from Fellini, who just appeared to kind of love me!
Terence Stamp
#87. Certainly for my father, there were great times, good times, not-so-good times. He might be shooting a Fellini film for six months, then not working for two months. I'm used to that dynamic.
Toby Jones
#89. God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.
Federico Fellini
#90. Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.
Federico Fellini
#91. 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.
Federico Fellini
#92. New York's like a boxing match. In Hollywood, it's like a Fellini movie or something.
John Cusack
#93. 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.
Federico Fellini
#94. The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.
Federico Fellini
#95. Oh, no. This has "marriage" written all over it. Travis, read my lips: remember that Fellini film with the prostitute who says that every new sunrise makes her a virgin? It doesn't work that way with me. Even the sun thinks I'm a slut.
Steve Kluger
#96. But, I'm a big Johnny Cash and a big Lou Reed fan and a Fellini fan.
Noah Taylor
#97. There is no such thing as a good paparazzo. A good paparazzo, that's a paparazzo who has had his camera broken. In fact, they are bandits, thieves of photography. (Statement after photographs were published showing Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude.)
Federico Fellini
#98. Fellini and Bunuel changed my life for me, they are my favourites. If it is true that movies are dreams, both of them, Fellini and Bunuel were shooting in a dream way.
Roberto Benigni
#99. Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism.
Federico Fellini
#100. My mother is like a character who escaped from the set of a Fellini film. She's a whole performing universe of her own. Activists would run a mile from her because they could not deal with what she is.
Arundhati Roy
