Federico Fellini

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

When I felt I was dying, these past few days, things were no longer anthropomorphic. The telephone, which looks like a sort of upturned black snake, was merely a telephone. Every thing was just a thing. The couch, which looked like a big square face drawn by Rubens, with buttons on the cover like wicked little eyes, was just a couch, rather shabby but nothing more. At such a time things don__ matter to you; you don__ bathe everything in your presence, like an amoeba. Things become innocent because you draw away from them; experience becomes virginal, as it was for the first man when he saw the valleys and the plains. You feel you are set in a tidy world: that is a door and it behaves like a door, that is white and behaves like white. What heaven: the symbolism of meanings loses all meaning. You see objects which are comforting because they are quite free. But suddenly you are flung into a new form of suffering because, when you come to miss the meaning of, say, a stool, reality suddenly becomes terrifying. Everything becomes monstrous, unattainable.

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

I don__ like the idea of __nderstanding_ a film. I don__ believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn__. If you are moved by it, you don__ need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

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.

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

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

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

When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every day. I put in what occurs to me that day out of my imagination. You start on a voyage; you know where you will end up but not what will occur along the way. You want to be surprised.

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

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

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

You exist only in what you do.

A different language is a different vision of life.

Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.

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.

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

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