Federico Fellini Quotes

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

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

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

A different language is a different vision of life.

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.

The visionary is the only realist.

No matter what happens, always Keep your childhood innocence. It's the most important thing.

Regrets are a waste of time. They're the past crippling you in the present.

Nothing is more honest than a dream.

Never trust a woman who doesn’t like to eat. She is probably lousy in bed.

I spent my life trying to cure myself of my education.

I never make moral judgments; I'm not qualified to do so. I am not a censor, a priest, or a politician.

As a writer and director, I want to know what is behind the good manners and soft voice. Who is inside the silhouette?

Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.

You exist only in what you do.

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

When I do things without any explanation, but just with spontaneity...I can be sure that I am right.

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

All art is autobiographical.

Our minds can shape the way a thing will be because we act according to our expectations.

Don't tell me what I'm doing; I don't want to know.

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

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

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

Fate is written in the face.

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.

It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.

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

I even see the cinema itself as a woman, with its alternation of light and darkness, of appearing and disappearing images

Freedom, especially a woman's freedom, is a conquest to be made, not a gift to be received. It isn't granted. It must be taken.

Nothing is sadder than laughter; nothing more beautiful, more magnificent, more uplifting and enriching than the terror of deep despair.

Our duty as storytellers is to bring people to the station. There each person will choose his or her own train...But we must at least take them to the station...to a point of departure.

I claim the right to contradict myself. I don't want to deprive myself of the right to talk nonsense, and I ask humbly to be allowed to be wrong sometimes.

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.

Marriage is a tyranny, a mortification of man's natural instincts. Man needs a multiplicity of relationships.

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

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

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

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

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

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

The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world.

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?

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

A creator always needs excuses.

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

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.

The beauty of life are women, no one loves them as much as me. I adore them all, the ugly, the beautiful, the cold, the sexy and especially those that are from cinema material, shadow and light.

I always direct the same film. I can't distinguish one from the other.

According to the doctors, I'm only suffering from a light form of premature baldness.