Quotes by Ingmar Bergman

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

“From an early age onward, it was said that 'Ingmar has no sense of humor.'”

“Jöns: But feel, to the very end, the triumph of being alive!”

“No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does straight to our emotions deep into the twilight room of the soul.”

“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.”

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

“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 feeli...”

“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 fea...”

“In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make som...”

“I think he's a very good technician. And he has something in Psycho, he had some moments. Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very prim...”

“I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops rela...”

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

“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 responsib...”

“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 ...”

“I am so 100 percent Swedish... 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. And I think I'm Swedish becau...”

“When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow?...”

“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. A little twitch in our optic nerve...”

“The demons are innumerable, arrive at the most inappropriate times and create panic and terror... but I have learned that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then th...”

“I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable. I think it's awful.”

“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 thei...”