Fellini was a hugely original spirit, a bona fide gagman, the king of contradiction, a well-oiled motor mouth — in short, anything except a thinker. He needed the interviews and the media because it was during these seeming exercises in vanity that he discovered things about himself. If you pushed him hard enough, he would come up with ideas that surprised even him.

On Federico Fellini's narcissism, in The Los Angeles Times (April 2003)