Ingmar Bergman Quotes

"I'm very, very lazy. I love to sit in a chair and look out the window and do nothing."

"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."

"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."

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

"The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times, and create panic and terror. But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"I am forever living in my childhood."

"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."

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

"Writing is boring, very boring, and it takes so much patience."

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

"Not a day has gone by in my life when I haven't thought about death."

"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.'"

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

"There is something joyous about not talking."

"We didn't know that Mother had gone through a passionate love affair or that Father suffered from severe depression. Mother was preparing to break out of her marriage, Father threatening to take his own life."

"I hope I never get so old I get religious."

"I usually say I left puberty at 58."

"The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy."

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

"We always regret that we did not ask our parents more, really get to know them while they were alive."

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

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

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

"When I'm on Faro, I'm never lonely."

"Now I want to make it plain that 'The Virgin Spring' must be regarded as an aberration. It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa."