133 Quotes by Federico Fellini

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

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

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.

What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one.... Its this in-between that Im calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible onewhich is really the realm of the artist.

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. Its 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 dont 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.

A sign of growing old is when interviewers start asking you,What would you do differently if you had your life to live over again? I give some sort of answer because I dont wish to be rude, but I dont tell them the image that comes into my mind because they would think it vain and frivolous, and no one wants to be a subject for ridicule. I see myself as a tall, skinny Fellini, vigorously lifting weights. Thats what I would do differently. I would lift weights.

Reality! But what does this word mean? Each has his own reality. I draw upon my personal reality upon the dark side of myself, my unconscious.

Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism.

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.