Quotes from Ingmar Bergman

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

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.

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

Everyone likes happiness, no one likes pain. But you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal . My fear of death — this infantile fixation of mine — was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry — with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.

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

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

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.

We make an idol of our fear and that idol we call God.

DESIREE: Don't forget, Madame, that love is a perpetual juggling of three balls. Their names are heart, word and sex. How easily these three balls can be juggled, and how easily one of them can be dropped.

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

Necessary illusions enable us to live.

Actually it deals ("as usual" I was about to say!) with Life, Love and Death. Because nothing in fact is more important. To occupy oneself with. To think of. To worry over. To be happy about. And so on.

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

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.

I would have been happier if I'd been anonymous.

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

Here in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity. It oozes out of me like a broken tube of toothpaste; it doesn't want to stay within the confines of my body. A strange feeling of weight and volume. Soul volume perhaps, which rises like clouds of smoke and envelops my body.