Federico Fellini Quotes

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

~ Federico Fellini

When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don’t matter to you; you don’t bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.

~ Federico Fellini

There is no end. There is no beginning. There is only the passion of life.

~ Federico Fellini

If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet...maybe we could understand something.

~ Federico Fellini

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

No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.

~ Federico Fellini

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

Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.

~ Federico Fellini

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

I think that one can have luck if one tries to create an atmosphere of spontaneity.

~ Federico Fellini

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

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

A different language is a different vision of life.

~ Federico Fellini

You exist only in what you do.

~ Federico Fellini

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

~ Federico Fellini

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

~ Federico Fellini

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

~ Federico Fellini

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.

~ Federico Fellini

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

~ Federico Fellini

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

~ Federico Fellini

Money is everywhere but so is poetry. What we lack are the poets.

~ Federico Fellini

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.

~ Federico Fellini