Ingmar Bergman Quotes

Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.

For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema.

I know that I shall have lost to the jungle if I take a weak moral standpoint or relax my mental punctiliousness. I have therefore come to a certain belief which is based on three powerful effective commandments: THOU SHALT BE ENTERTAINING AT ALL TIMES. THOU SHALT OBEY THY ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE AT ALL TIMES. THOU SHALT MAKE EACH FILM AS IF IT WERE THY LAST.

I hate to travel. I don't go anywhere.

The anger and the creativity are so closely intertwined with me, and there's plenty of anger left.

I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.

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.

Sara: As professor emeritus, you ought to know why it hurts. But you don't know.
Sara: You know so much, and you don't know anything.

I am conscious about myself and everything, and then suddenly, or slowly, my conscious fades out. Switches off. And it's not existing, and that's a marvelous feeling. That from existing, I am not existing. And at that moment, nothing can happen to me.

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.

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.

I supply my own angels and demons. I exist on a stony beach, which lowers itself in waves toward a protective ocean. A dog barks; a child cries; the day sinks and becomes night. You can never scare me. No human being will be able to scare me ever again. I have a prayer that I repeat to myself in absolute stillness: May a wind come to stir up the ocean and the stifling twilight. May a bird come from water out there and explode the silence with its call.

When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It's like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.

The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.

I think I am a better ghost than I am a human being.

I think that for some time now I have been living with an anxiety which has had no tangible cause. It has been like having a toothache, without the conscientious dentist having been able to find anything wrong with the tooth or with the person as a whole.

The only thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other people. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me - that, I think, would be terrifying.

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.' .

Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons.

Life wasn't about freeing up human souls. It was about creating obedient slaves in the hierarchical construction of the society - with God at the top, then the king and then the father.

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.

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.

Occasionally I sense an insane wail deep down in the pit, the echo alone reaching me, striking without warning, a child weeping uninhibitedly, imprisoned forever.

In 'The Serpent's Egg,' I created a Berlin which no one recognized, not even I.

I was bloody ill-tempered when I was young.

I always work with 18 friends.

Sometimes, I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films.

Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.

There are moments when I can wander through my childhood's landscape, through rooms long ago, remember how they were furnished, where the pictures hung on the walls, the way the light fell. It's like a film - little scraps of a film, which I set running and which I can reconstruct to the last detail - except their smell.

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.

When you finish a film, you never want to see it again.

Reality is perhaps not at all what I imagine. Perhaps it doesn't exist, in fact. Perhaps it only exists as a longing.

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.

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.

They said you were mentally healthy, but your madness is the worst

There hasn't been anyone with whom I can discuss my scripts. Even when the film is done, there is no one I can show it to who gives his sincere opinion. There is silence.

Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.

On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against.

It is my opinion that 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, genetaring and degenerating itself.

I have such difficulty calming down - my stomach, my head, reality, everything. That is the reason I live in Faro.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.

I shall remember this moment: the silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries, the bowl of milk. Your faces in the evening light.[ ... ] I shall carry this memory carefully in my hands as if it were a bowl brimful of fresh milk. It will be a sign to me, and a great sufficiency.

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.

I feel very strongly that I'm surrounded by other realities.

I have a feeling of complete balance. The sea, the house, the loneliness, the light. Everything is clearer. Much more precise. I have the feeling that I am living on a limit, and I'm crossing that limit sometimes.

From an early age onward, it was said that 'Ingmar has no sense of humor.'

I know, of course, that by using film we can bring in other previously unknown worlds, realities beyond reality.

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.

I was a very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today I'd say, 'You're very talented and I'll try to help you, but I don't want anything else to do with you.

I once had a dream, or a vision, and I imagined that dream to be of importance to other people, so I wrote the manuscript and made the film. But it is not until the moment when my dream meets with your emotions and your minds that my shadows come to life. It is your recognition that brings them to life. It is your indifference that kills them. I hope that you will understand; that you when you leave the cinema will take with you an experience or a sudden thought - or maybe a question. The efforts of my friends and myself have then not been in vain ...

I was very much in love with my mother. She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.

We're thankful for the horrors we are used to. The unknown ones are worst

Man has made himself free, terribly and dizzyingly free. Religion and art are kept alive for the sake of sentimentality, as a conventional politeness toward the past, a benevolent solicitude of leisure's increasingly nervous citizens.

Only someone who is well prepared has the opportunity to improvise.

To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that

You never know when I'm lying. So it would be more practical to believe what I say
-Pauline in In the Presence of a Clown

I am so 100 percent Swedish ... Someone has said a Swede is like a bottle of ketchup - nothing and nothing and then all at once - splat. I think I'm a little like that.

Here, in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity.

Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it's gone.

Necessary illusions enable us to live.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

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.

Minus: Papa, I'm scared. When I was hugging Karin in the boat, reality burst open. Do you understand?

David: I do.

Minus: Reality burst open, and I tumbled out. It's like a dream. Anything can happen. Anything.

David: I know.

Minus: I can't live in this new world.

David: Yes, you can. But you must have something to hold on to.

Minus: What would that be? A god? Give me proof of God. You can't.

David: Yes, I can. But you have to listen carefully.

Minus: Yes, I need to listen.

David: I can only give you a hint of my own hope. It is to know that love exists as something real in the human world.

Minus: A special kind of love, I suppose?

David: All kinds, Minus. The highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime. All kinds of love.

Minus: And the longing for love?

David: Longing and denial. Trust and distrust.

Minus: Then love is the proof?

David: I don't know if love is proof of God's existence, or if love is God himself.

Minus: To you, love and God are the same thing.

David: That thought helps me in my emptiness and despair.

Minus: Tell me more, Papa.

David: Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and despair into life. It's like a reprieve, Minus, from a death sentence.

Minus: Papa... If it is as you say, then Karin is surrounded by God, since

I usually say I left puberty at 58.

I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful.

One has to manage alone as best one can. (Karin Bergman)

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

One of ennui's most terribel components is the overwhelming feeling of ennui that comes over you whenever you try to explain it.

If I don't create, I don't exist.

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 have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.

I am forever living in my childhood.

I'd prostitute my talents if it would further my cause, steal if there was no way out, killing my friends or anyone else if it would help my art.

Jöns: But feel, to the very end, the triumph of being alive!

Artistic license sneered through the thin fabric.

I am normally afraid of birds and have never dreamt of any bird in my life.

Sometimes I go for days without speaking to a soul. I think, "I should make that call", but I put it off. Because there's something pleasurable about not talking. But then I love talking, so it's not that. But sometimes it can be nice. It's not like I sit here philosophizing, because I've no talent for that. It's just this thing about silence that's so wonderful.

I haven't put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have.

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.

Death: When next we meet, the hour will strike for you and your friends.
Antonius Block: And will you reveal your secrets?
Death: I have no secrets.
Antonius Block: So do you know nothing?
Death: I am unknowing.

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

Only he who is well prepared has any opportunity to improvise.

The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.

To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe.

My pictures are always part of my thinking, and my emotions, tensions, dreams, desires.

You know I feel such tenderness for you. It's difficult to bear. I don't know what to do with my tenderness.

Well, we're grasping for two things at once. Partly for communion with others - that's the deepest instinct in us. And partly, we're seeking security. By constant communion with others we hope we shall be able to accept the horrible fact of our total solitude.

The older I become, the more I think about my mother.

My play opens with an actor walking down into the audience, where he strangles the critic, then reads aloud from a little black book all the humiliations he has noted therein. Then he throws up on the audience, after which he exits and puts a bullet through his head.

The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress.

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: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct.

I want to stop. I want to stay on Fårö, and read the books I haven't read, find out things I haven't yet found out. I want to write things I haven't written. To listen to music, and talk to my neighbors. To live together with my wife a very calm, very secure, very lazy existence, for the rest of my life.

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

Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace.

I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it's because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being 'arranged.'

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.

Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.

I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.

Death: Do you never stop questioning?
Antonius Block: No. I never stop.