Top 77 Quotes About Federico Fellini
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Nothing is sadder than laughter; nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair.
Federico Fellini
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. According to the doctors, I'm only suffering from a light form of premature baldness.
Federico Fellini
#12. Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.
Federico Fellini
#13. There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the infinite passion of life.
Federico Fellini
#15. When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity ... I can be sure that I am right.
Federico Fellini
#17. Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.
Federico Fellini
#18. Only the early Fitzgerald was great. Then came an orgy of brutal realism
Federico Fellini
#20. 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
#21. No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.
Federico Fellini
#22. I even see the cinema itself as a woman, with its alternation of light and darkness, of appearing and disappearing images
Federico Fellini
#23. A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.
Federico Fellini
#24. As I don't consider myself exceptional, but simply a storyteller, each of my stories is really a period of my life. Deep down I feel that criticism of my work-which is the most sincere and authentic vision of myself-is unsuitable and immodest, whether it is favorable or unfavorable.
Federico Fellini
#25. 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.
Federico Fellini
#26. 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
#27. Put yourself into life and never lose your openness, your childish enthusiasm throughout the journey that is life, and things will come your way.
Federico Fellini
#28. Marriage is a tyranny, a mortification of man's natural instincts. Man needs a multiplicity of relationships.
Federico Fellini
#29. 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
#30. Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you've made is worth the misery of having to review it.
Federico Fellini
#31. A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
Federico Fellini
#32. It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.
Federico Fellini
#33. Marriage, if it is to survive, must be treated as the beginning, not as the happy ending.
Federico Fellini
#34. No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.
Federico Fellini
#35. I think that one can have luck if one tries to create an atmosphere of spontaneity.
Federico Fellini
#36. Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear, the same self-doubts ... and I have only one source on which I can draw, because it comes from within me.
Federico Fellini
#38. The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set
Federico Fellini
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet ... maybe we could understand something.
Federico Fellini
#42. 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
#43. Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism.
Federico Fellini
#44. Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.
Federico Fellini
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Experience is what you get while looking for something else.
Federico Fellini
#50. There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably.
Federico Fellini
#51. The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.
Federico Fellini
#52. 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
#53. Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.
Federico Fellini
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Never trust a woman who doesn't like to eat. She is probably lousy in bed.
Federico Fellini
#57. 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
#58. I never make moral judgments; I'm not qualified to do so. I am not a censor, a priest, or a politician.
Federico Fellini
#59. 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
#61. 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
#62. You have to live spherically - in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm - and things will come your way.
Federico Fellini
#63. 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
#64. Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.
Federico Fellini
#65. I always direct the same film. I can't distinguish one from the other.
Federico Fellini
#66. It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.
Federico Fellini
#67. God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.
Federico Fellini
#69. The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.
Federico Fellini
#70. All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
Federico Fellini
#71. 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
#72. Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present.
Federico Fellini
#73. 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
#75. Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.
Federico Fellini
#76. 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
#77. 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
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