Federico Fellini (Jan 20, 1920 – Oct 31, 1993)

“A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provided they come close together.”

“When you are trying to direct, they will tell you there are a lot of rules. Of course these rules are important, but in reality the way to tell a story is the way you would tell it to your friends in a cafe. And if you have a talent as a narrator, you will tell this story well. Otherwise all the technique in the world will never help you.”

Photo by Vittoriano Rastelli, 1982

“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 re-education of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borgese on a daily basis.”
Federico Fellini

“If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet…maybe we could understand something.”

“You have to live spherically – in many directions. Never lose your childish enthusiasm – and things will come your way.”

“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”

“My relationship with my body has changed. I used to consider it as a servant who should obey, function, give pleasure. In sickness, you realise that you are not the boss. It is the other way around.”

Photo: Pierluigi Praturlon, 1960s

“I don’t like the idea of ‘understanding’ a film. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.”

“Life is a combination of magic and pasta.”

“Even the most miserable life is better than a sheltered existence in an organized society where everything is calculated and perfected.”

“We must get beyond passions, like a great work of art. In such miraculous harmony. We should learn to love each other so much to live outside of time… detached.”

“An artist is 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. That is the realm of the artist.”

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

“The only place where you can be a dictator and still be loved is on the movie set.”

“There is abundant testimony that if we choose love rather than self, we gain immeasurably.”

“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. One should go to the cinema with the innocence of a fetus.”