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Ingmar Bergman Quotes

Ingmar Bergman quotesA 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. Ingmar Bergman

All of us collect fortunes when we are children. A fortune of colors, of lights, and darkness, of movement, of tensions. Some of us have the fantastic chance to go back to his fortune when grown up. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

Directing is more fun with women. Everything is. Ingmar Bergman

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

Film has dream, film has music. 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

For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of, is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable. (On Orson Welles.) Ingmar Bergman

For me, hell has always been a most suggestive sort of place; but I’ve never regarded it as being located anywhere else than on earth. Hell is created by human beings – on earth! Ingmar Bergman

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

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. Ingmar Bergman

I could always live in my art but never in my life. Ingmar Bergman

I don’t want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically. I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency. Ingmar Bergman

I don’t watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry… and miserable. I think it’s awful. Ingmar Bergman

I have a lot of tics and phobias. I hate to travel. I hate to go to festivals. I hate it when somebody gets close behind me. I’m scared of the darkness. I hate open doors. Ingmar Bergman

I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. Ingmar Bergman

I hope I never get so old I get religious. Ingmar Bergman

I make all my decisions on intuition. 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 think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is “Winter Light”. Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture. Ingmar Bergman

I was very cruel to actors and to other people. I think I was a very, very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today, I think I would say, “You are very talented and I will see if I can help you, but I don’t think I want anything else to do with you.” Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman Quotes

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images. 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’m deeply fixated on my childhood. Some impressions are extremely vivid, light, smell, and all. 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. Ingmar Bergman

In a quarrel with one of my sons, I said, “I know I’ve been a lousy father”. He said, “A father? You haven’t been a father at all!” Ingmar Bergman

It’s a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then. Ingmar Bergman

Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure. 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

My professor told me when I started in the ’40s that a director should listen and keep his mouth shut. Took me a long time to understand I talked too much. Now I know you should listen with your ears – and your heart. Ingmar Bergman

New cities arouse too many sensations in me. They give me too many impressions to experience at the same time. They all crowd in on me. Being in a new city overwhelms me, unsettles me. Ingmar Bergman

No one is safe from religious ideas and confessional phenomena. Neither you nor I. We can fall victim to them when we least expect it. It’s like Mao flu, or being struck by lightning. You’re utterly helpless. Exposed. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

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

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. Ingmar Bergman

Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

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

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

Ingmar Bergman Quotes

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. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe. Ingmar Bergman

Today we say all art is political. But I’d say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It’s a matter of attitudes. Ingmar Bergman

We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. Ingmar 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. Ingmar Bergman

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. Ingmar Bergman

Working in this medium and being a man of the theater, I’m like the common whore. I have an enormous need for people to like me and what I’m doing. That it be accepted and praised and so forth. It’s always painful to be disapproved of. Ingmar Bergman

 

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