A different language is a different vision of life.

— Federico Fellini

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

— Federico Fellini

An artist is a provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one. That is the realm of the artist.

— Federico Fellini

Borges is particularly stimulating to a man who works in the cinema, because the unusual thing about his writing is that it is like a dream, extraordinarily farsighted in calling up from the unconscious complete images in which the thing itself, and its meaning, coexist - exactly as happens in a film. And, just as happens in dreams, in Borges the incongruous, the absurd, the contradictory, the arcane and the repetitive, although as powerfully imaginative as ever, are at the same time illumined like the careful details of something larger, something unknown, and are the faultless elements of a cruelly perfect, indifferent mosaic. Even the fact that Borges's work is strangely fragmentary makes me think of a broken dreamlike flow; and the heterogeneous quality of his work - stories, essays, poems - I prefer to see not as the union of the multiple threads in a greedy, impatient talent, but as a mysterious sign of unending change.

— Federico Fellini

Censorship is advertising paid by the government.

— Federico Fellini

Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.

— Federico Fellini

Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear the same self-doubts ... and I have only one source on which I can draw because it comes from within me.

— Federico Fellini

Every time I start a picture ... I feel the same fear the same self-doubts. . . And I have only one source on which I can draw because it comes from within me.

— Federico Fellini

Experience is what you get while looking for something else.

— Federico Fellini

I don’t like the idea of “understanding” a film. I don’t believe that rational understanding is an essential element in the reception of any work of art. Either a film has something to say to you or it hasn’t. If you are moved by it, you don’t need it explained to you. If not, no explanation can make you moved by it.

— Federico Fellini