Federico Fellini Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

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

Federico Fellini
All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

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

Federico Fellini
Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

Federico Fellini
The movie business is macabre. Grotesque. It is a combination of a football game and a brothel.

Federico Fellini
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
Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can't teach old fleas new dogs.

Federico Fellini
What is an artist? 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 — which is really the realm of the artist.

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
God may not play dice but he enjoys a good round of Trivial Pursuit every now and again.

Federico Fellini
Would you be able to give up everything, to start life all over again to choose one thing, just one thing, and be faithful to it... to make it the thing that gives meaning to your life... something that contains everything else... that becomes everything else just because of your boundless faith in it?

Federico Fellini
The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borghese on a daily basis.

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

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

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

Federico Fellini
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
The picture is in your head, in your imagination, everything.

Federico Fellini
Marriage, if it is to survive, must be treated as the beginning, not as the happy ending.

Federico Fellini
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
One of the greatest handicaps is to fear a mistake. You have stopped yourself. You have to move freely into the arena, not just to wait for the perfect situation, the perfect moment... If you have to make a mistake, it's better to make a mistake of action than one of inaction. If I had the opportunity again, I would take chances.

Federico Fellini
It's better to destroy than to create when you're not creating those few things which are truly necessary.

Federico Fellini
It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.

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

Federico Fellini
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.

Federico Fellini
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. Is it still possible that one thousand people might group together in the dark and experience the dream that a single individual has directed?

Federico Fellini
I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.

Federico Fellini
Cinéma-vérité? I prefer 'cine-mendacity'. A lie is always more interesting than the truth. Lies are the soul of showmanship and I adore shows.

Federico Fellini
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
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
A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provided they come close together.

Federico Fellini