Top 30 Federico Fellini Quotes

The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all – that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open – has disappeared.

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

If you do what you were born to do, I think you will never grow old.

Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.

When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every day. I put in what occurs to me that day out of my imagination. You start on a voyage; you know where you will end up but not what will occur along the way. You want to be surprised.

Nietzsche claimed that his genius was in his nostrils and I think that is a very excellent place for it to be.

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.

It’s easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

Fate is written in the face.

I do not need a producer. I need only a good production manager. I need only a man who will give me money.

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?

A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.

I am not the kind of director who sits in a chair smoking a cigar talking with a microphone to 10 assistants. I need to move. To touch. To put a painting on a wall. To arrange a set.

My work has always been the thing that justifies my life.

A different language is a different vision of life.

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 the rest of it.

My relationship with my body has changed. I used to consider it as a servant who should obey, function, give pleasure. In sickness, you realise that you are not the boss. It is the other way around.

I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.

I did not realise that I was so loved. It can’t just be for the films. I must have done something else, but I can’t remember what.

To people of my generation, the picture show was really another dimension – sensual, whimsical. No uniforms or collective rites, but a place where little boys like me could laugh and feel free.

Through the ages, from the beginning of time, I’m certain man has covered woman’s face with masks. They are, however, his masks, not hers.

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.

I’d like very much to make a confident picture. I would like to be as good as nature, which, with a shower, produces flowers and grass to cover the destruction. But we are surrounded by human fragmentation, by pessimism, and it is difficult to talk of other things.

Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you’ve made is worth the misery of having to review it.

No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.

It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.