178 Quotes by Ingmar Bergman

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

I hope I never get so old I get religious.

Theater is the beginning and end and actually everything, while cinema belongs to the whoring and slaughterhouse trade.

There is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.

For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour.

People ask what are my intentions with my films - my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer...

Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me.

The film medium is some sort of magic. I think also it's a magic that every frame comes and stands still for a fraction of a second and then it darkens. A half part of the time when you see a picture you sit in complete darkness. Isn't that fascinating? That is magic.

I think I have made just one picture that I really like...