Top 100 Quotes About Ingmar Bergman
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time. Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story.
Jeff Lemire
#5. 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
#6. Mexican cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Emilio Fernandez were students of both Sergei Eisenstein and Toland. Their exteriors and lighting were gorgeous. And the films Ingmar Bergman did with Sven Nykvist were exceptional.
Vilmos Zsigmond
#7. 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
#8. Ingmar Bergman had a great sense of humor, and he had a very special, characteristic laugh that you always recognized - if he went to watch a theater show, 'Ah! He is here tonight.'
Max Von Sydow
#9. 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
#10. I think Ingmar Bergman, Francoise Truffaut - all these people created images in my mind, beautiful pictures, I loved what was known at that time as the foreign film.
Jackie DeShannon
#11. A movie that I've seen probably the most is 'Fanny & Alexander,' the Ingmar Bergman movie. I even dragged my friends to the super long version that had an intermission. I don't know how much they liked me that day.
Gillian Jacobs
#12. Sometimes I get a little tired of it. But you know, what a privilege, to get tired of working with Ingmar Bergman.
Liv Ullmann
#13. Sometimes I work on film sets. I've done this for 40 years. I always wanted to photograph on the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity.
Mary Ellen Mark
#14. Me sitting down for dinner with Ingmar Bergman felt like a house painter sitting down with Picasso.
Woody Allen
#15. [Akiro] Kurosawa, no doubt, was a big influence. Movies sometimes more than directors have influenced me: The Grapes of Wrath, by John Ford, was an extraordinary discovery. Sergei Eisenstein, of course. Later on, [Ingmar] Bergman.
Costa-Gavras
#16. I own one movie by fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, because I have to. You can't be a movie critic with a collection of six or seven hundred DVDs that includes everything from 'Tokyo Story' to 'Poison Ivy: The New Seduction' and not have a Bergman movie.
Steve Erickson
#18. 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
#19. I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.
Ingmar Bergman
#20. Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.
Ingmar Bergman
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Growing older is like climbing a mountain: the higher you get, the more strength you need, but the further you see.
Ingmar Bergman
#26. Only he who is well prepared has any opportunity to improvise.
Ingmar Bergman
#27. 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
#30. 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
#31. I am normally afraid of birds and have never dreamt of any bird in my life.
Ingmar Bergman
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure ...
Ingmar Bergman
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.
Ingmar Bergman
#44. 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
#45. The older I become, the more I think about my mother.
Ingmar Bergman
#46. I think I have made just one picture that I really like ...
Ingmar Bergman
#47. 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
#48. For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.
Ingmar Bergman
#49. We make each other alive; it doesn't make a difference if it hurts.
Ingmar Bergman
#50. The only thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other people. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me - that, I think, would be terrifying.
Ingmar Bergman
#51. When you're as chaotic as I am, you need a very firm structure in your life.
Ingmar Bergman
#52. Sometimes, I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films.
Ingmar Bergman
#53. 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
#54. I have such difficulty calming down - my stomach, my head, reality, everything. That is the reason I live in Faro.
Ingmar Bergman
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.
Ingmar Bergman
#58. From an early age onward, it was said that 'Ingmar has no sense of humor.'
Ingmar Bergman
#59. 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
#60. Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons.
Ingmar Bergman
#62. We always regret that we did not ask our parents more, really get to know them while they were alive.
Ingmar Bergman
#63. Writing is boring, very boring, and it takes so much patience.
Ingmar Bergman
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.
Ingmar Bergman
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#73. Everyone likes happiness, no one likes pain. But you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.
Ingmar Bergman
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe.
Ingmar Bergman
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. It's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it.
Ingmar Bergman
#82. 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
#84. 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
#85. I could always live in my art but never in my life
Ingmar Bergman
#88. I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
Ingmar Bergman
#89. The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress.
Ingmar Bergman
#90. 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
#91. I haven't put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have.
Ingmar Bergman
#92. I was booed at the premiere of 'Miss Julie,' a remarkably stimulating experience.
Ingmar Bergman
#93. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy.
Ingmar Bergman
#95. I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.
Ingmar Bergman
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)
Ingmar Bergman
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