Persona Ingmar Bergman Quotes

Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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

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

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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

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

Sometimes I get a little tired of it. But you know, what a privilege, to get tired of working with Ingmar Bergman. ~ Liv Ullmann

Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet; other times I think it's being gulped down in huge, Jaws-shaped chunks. In those quaint days before the internet, once you made it to your desk there wasn't much to distract you. You could sit there working or you could just sit there. Now you sit down and there's a universe of possibilities – many of them obscurely relevant to the work you should be getting on with – to tempt you. To think that I can be sitting here, trying to write something about Ingmar Bergman and, a moment later, on the merest whim, can be watching a clip from a Swedish documentary about Don Cherry – that is a miracle (albeit one with a very potent side-effect, namely that it's unlikely I'll ever have the patience to sit through an entire Bergman film again).

Then there's the outsourcing of memory. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of memorising passages of poetry and compiling detailed indexes in the backs of books of prose. So if there was a passage I couldn't remember, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now, in what TS Eliot, with great prescience, called "this twittering world", I just google the key phrase of the half-remembered quote. Which is great, but it's drained some of the purpose from my life.

Exactly the same thing has happened now that it's possible to get hold of out-of-print books instantly on the web. That's great too. But one of the side incentives to ~ Geoff Dyer

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

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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

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

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that ~ Ingmar Bergman

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

I hate to travel. I don't go anywhere. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

I am forever living in my childhood. ~ Ingmar Bergman

I own one movie by fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman, because I have to. You can't be a movie critic with a collection of six or seven hundred DVDs that includes everything from 'Tokyo Story' to 'Poison Ivy: The New Seduction' and not have a Bergman movie. ~ Steve Erickson

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

Mexican cinematographers Gabriel Figueroa and Emilio Fernandez were students of both Sergei Eisenstein and Toland. Their exteriors and lighting were gorgeous. And the films Ingmar Bergman did with Sven Nykvist were exceptional. ~ Vilmos Zsigmond

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

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

Beautiful self-delusion: Isn't that what being young is all about? You think you're immortal until one day when you're around sixty, it hits you: you see and Ingmar Bergman-y specter of death and you do some soul searching and possibly adopt a kid in need. You resolve to live the rest of your life in a way you can be proud of. But I am not one of those young people. I've been obsessed with death since I was born. ~ Lena Dunham

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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

Artistic license sneered through the thin fabric. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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. ~ Ingmar Bergman

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.' ~ Ingmar Bergman

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