Ingmar Bergman
If I didn't have my profession, I think I would be sitting in a nuthouse. But I have been unceasingly at work, and this has been very healthy for me. So I had no need for therapy.
I usually say I left puberty at 58.
I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
Sometimes, I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films.
I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.
I am very shy with people I don't know.
I am very much aware of my own double self. The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work - he is in touch with the child. He is not rational; he is impulsive and extremely emotional.
When we came out from the Elysee palace, there was a gigantic limousine waiting for us and four police on motorcycles. It is probably one of the few times I have experienced my fame. I thought it was so fantastic that I laughed to the point of shouting.
I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can't for a moment be equal to the suffering you've caused.
Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.Collection: Opportunity
I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.Collection: Dream
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.Collection: Art
We make each other alive; it doesn’t make a difference if it hurts.Collection: Hurt
I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.Collection: Army
Old age is like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become, but your views become more extensive.Collection: Tired
Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.Collection: Solitude
When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.Collection: Intellectual
To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe.Collection: Film
I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot.Collection: Challenges
The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.Collection: Running
I could always live in my art but never in my lifeCollection: Art
To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for thatCollection: Long
My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.Collection: Dream
I usually take a walk after breakfast, write for three hours, have lunch and read in the afternoon. Demons don’t like fresh air - they prefer it if you stay in bed with cold feet; for a person who is as chaotic as me, who struggles to be in control, it is an absolute necessity to follow these rules and routines. If I let myself go, nothing will get done.Collection: Struggle
Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.Collection: People
No other art-medium–neither painting nor poetry–can communicate the specific quality of the dream as well as the film can. When the lights go down in the cinema and this white shining point opens up for us, our gaze stops flitting hither and thither, settles and becomes quite steady. We just sit there, letting the images flow out over us. Our will ceases to function. We lose our ability to sort things out and fix them in their proper places. We're drawn into a course of events–we're participants in a dream. And manufacturing dreams, that's a juicy business.Collection: Dream
I am very much aware of my own double self... The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work - he is in touch with the child.Collection: Children
I feel very strongly that I’m surrounded by other realities.Collection: Reality
There is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.Collection: Music
The demons are innumerable, arrive at the most inappropriate times and create panic and terror. But I have learned that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage. Lilies often grow out of carcasses' arseholes.Collection: Positivity
There's always a tension in me between my urge to destroy and my will to live... Every morning I wake up with a new wrath, a new suspiciousness, a new desire to live.Collection: Morning
I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to men has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams.Collection: Dream
First, I write down all I know about the story, at length and in detail. Then I sink the iceberg and let some of it float up just a little.Collection: Writing
I think I have made just one picture that I really like.Collection: Thinking
I think I'm Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can't imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I'm very Swedish - I don't dislike to be alone.Collection: Country
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Thinking
One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)Collection: Bergman
When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.Collection: Doe
A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.Collection: Past
I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil - or perhaps a saint - out of stone.Collection: Angel
I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.Collection: Liars
We worked on 'Fanny and Alexander' for seven months and it was an amusing production. Still, it was very long and heavy and so awfully complicated, .. And when the premiere was over and everything went well, I thought, 'That's that.' .Collection: Seven Months
My basic view of things is - not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer.Collection: Views
Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure.Collection: Failure
When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure - The Serpent's Egg, The Touch, Face to Face and so on.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Lying
I know, of course, that by using film we can bring in other previously unknown worlds, realities beyond reality.Collection: Reality
Art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God.Collection: Art