Quotes from Federico Fellini

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

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?

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.

You exist only in what you do.

I make pictures to tell a story, to tell lies, and to amuse.

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

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

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

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

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

I'd like very much to make a confident picture. I would like to be as good as nature, which, with a shower, produces flowers and grass to cover the destruction. But we are surrounded by human fragmentation, by pessimism, and it is difficult to talk of other things.

Peellaert's comic strips were the literature of intelligence, imagination and romanticism.

The public has lost the habit of movie-going because the cinema no longer possesses the charm, the hypnotic charisma, the authority it once commanded. The image it once held for us all - that of a dream we dreamt with our eyes open - has disappeared.

No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.

Life is a combination of magic and pasta.

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.

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

To people of my generation, the picture show was really another dimension - sensual, whimsical. No uniforms or collective rites, but a place where little boys like me could laugh and feel free.

I do not need a producer. I need only a good production manager. I need only a man who will give me money.

I always direct the same film. I cannot distinguish one from the other.

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

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.

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.