Federico Fellini Quotes

In the myth of the cinema, Oscar is the supreme prize.

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

Our dreams are our real life. My fantasies and obsessions are not only my reality, but the stuff of which my films are made.

You exist only in what you do.

I`m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it`s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It`s not just an art form; it`s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It`s my way of telling a story.

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 all the rest of it.

My work is my only relationship to everything.

It`s absolutely impossible to improvise. Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It is like sending a missile to the moon. It isn`t improvised. It is too defined to be called improvisational, too mechanical. Art is a scientific operation, so I can say that what we usually call improvisation is in my case just having an ear and eye for things that sometimes occur during the time we are making the picture.

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

Happiness is simply a temporary condition that proceeds unhappiness. Fortunately for us, it works the other way around as well. But it`s all a part of the carnival, isn`t it.

In the mythology of the cinema, the Oscar is the supreme prize.

I think he is the greatest example of all that an author of the cinema should be. I feel a fraternal affinity with his way of telling a story. - on Akira Kurosawa

Anyone who lives, as I do, in a world of imagination must make an enormous and unnatural effect to be factual in the ordinary sense. I confess I would be a terrible witness in court because of this-and a terrible journalist. I feel compelled to a story the way I see it and this is seldom the way it happened, in all its documentary detail.

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.

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

We don`t really know who woman is. She remains in that precise place within man where darkness begins. Talking about women means talking about the darkest part of ourselves, the undeveloped part, the true mystery within. In the beginning, I believe man was complete and androgynous-both male and female, or neither, like angels. Then came the division, and Eve was taken from him. So the problem for man is to reunite himself with the other half of his being, to find the woman who is right for him-right be she is simply a projection, a mirror of himself. A man can`t become whole or free until he has set woman free-his woman. It`s his responsibility, not hers. He can`t be complete, truly alive until he makes her his sexual companion, and not a slave of libidinous acts or a saint with a halo.

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

Put yourself into life and never lose your openness, your childish enthusiasm throughout the journey that is life, and things will come your way.

I always direct the same film. I can`t distinguish one from another.

A different language is a different vision of life.

You have to live spherically--in many directions. To accept yourself for what you are without inhibitions, to be open.

When you live with another person for 50 years, all of your memories are invested in that person, like a bank account of shared memories. It's not that you refer to them constantly. In fact, for people who do not live in the past, you almost never say, 'Do you remember that night we...?'� But you don't have to. That is the best of all. You know that the other person does remember. Thus, the past is part of the present as long as the other person lives. It is better than any scrapbook, because you are both living scrapbooks.

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.

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

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