Ingmar Bergman Quotes & Sayings

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. — 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

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

You know I feel such tenderness for you. It's difficult to bear. I don't know what to do with my tenderness. — Ingmar Bergman

I have always appreciated the honest brutality of the international film world. One need never doubt one's worth in the market. Mine was zero. — 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

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

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

I know that I shall have lost to the jungle if I take a weak moral standpoint or relax my mental punctiliousness. I have therefore come to a certain belief which is based on three powerful effective commandments: THOU SHALT BE ENTERTAINING AT ALL TIMES. THOU SHALT OBEY THY ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE AT ALL TIMES. THOU SHALT MAKE EACH FILM AS IF IT WERE THY LAST. — Ingmar Bergman

Necessary illusions enable us to live. — Ingmar Bergman

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 is something joyous about not talking. — Ingmar Bergman

Aging is not uncomplicated. Creativity is an extraordinary help against destructive demons. — Ingmar Bergman

I am forever living in my childhood. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

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

When we came out from the Elysee palace, there was a gigantic limousine waiting for us and four police on motorcycles. It is probably one of the few times I have experienced my fame. I thought it was so fantastic that I laughed to the point of shouting. — Ingmar Bergman

This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously? — 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

I make all my decisions on intuition. — Ingmar Bergman

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? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure - THE SERPENT'S EGG, THE TOUCH, FACE TO FACE and so on — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

A 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

I supply my own angels and demons. I exist on a stony beach, which lowers itself in waves toward a protective ocean. A dog barks; a child cries; the day sinks and becomes night. You can never scare me. No human being will be able to scare me ever again. I have a prayer that I repeat to myself in absolute stillness: May a wind come to stir up the ocean and the stifling twilight. May a bird come from water out there and explode the silence with its call. — Ingmar Bergman

When you're as chaotic as I am, you need a very firm structure in your life. — Ingmar Bergman

To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated. — Ingmar Bergman

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

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. — Ingmar Bergman

On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against. — Ingmar Bergman

I dream about doing a film about once a week. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — 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

I once had a dream, or a vision, and I imagined that dream to be of importance to other people, so I wrote the manuscript and made the film. But it is not until the moment when my dream meets with your emotions and your minds that my shadows come to life. It is your recognition that brings them to life. It is your indifference that kills them. I hope that you will understand; that you when you leave the cinema will take with you an experience or a sudden thought - or maybe a question. The efforts of my friends and myself have then not been in vain ... — Ingmar Bergman

Death: When next we meet, the hour will strike for you and your friends.
Antonius Block: And will you reveal your secrets?
Death: I have no secrets.
Antonius Block: So do you know nothing?
Death: I am unknowing. — Ingmar Bergman

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

For me, the human face is the most important subject of the cinema. — Ingmar Bergman

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

Writing is boring, very boring, and it takes so much patience. — Ingmar Bergman

The doors between the old man today and the child are still open, wide open. I can stroll through my grandmother's house and know exactly where the pictures are, the furniture was, how it looked, the voice, the smells. I can move from my bed at night today to my childhood in less than a second. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

I want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me. — Ingmar Bergman

It's so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it. — Ingmar Bergman

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

To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that — 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

I hate to travel. I don't go anywhere. — Ingmar Bergman

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

I have a feeling of complete balance. The sea, the house, the loneliness, the light. Everything is clearer. Much more precise. I have the feeling that I am living on a limit, and I'm crossing that limit sometimes. — Ingmar Bergman

I was bloody ill-tempered when I was young. — Ingmar Bergman

I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil - or perhaps a saint - out of stone. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

Sometimes, I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films. — 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

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

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. — Ingmar Bergman

Mother was actually a great doer and organizer. All the special occasions were directed by mother. — Ingmar Bergman

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

I was booed at the premiere of 'Miss Julie,' a remarkably stimulating experience. — Ingmar Bergman

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

The older I become, the more I think about my mother. — Ingmar Bergman

I am conscious about myself and everything, and then suddenly, or slowly, my conscious fades out. Switches off. And it's not existing, and that's a marvelous feeling. That from existing, I am not existing. And at that moment, nothing can happen to me. — Ingmar Bergman

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

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. — Ingmar Bergman

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

First, I write down all I know about the story, at length and in detail. Then I sink the iceberg and let some of it float up just a little. — Ingmar Bergman

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

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

Perhaps we are the same person. Perhaps we have no limits; perhaps we flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently. You bear terrible thoughts; it is almost painful to be near you. At the same time it is enticing. Do you know why? — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

Artistic license sneered through the thin fabric. — Ingmar Bergman

I always work with 18 friends. — 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

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

I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible. — Ingmar Bergman

I usually take a walk after breakfast, write for three hours, have lunch and read in the afternoon. Demons don't like fresh air - they prefer it if you stay in bed with cold feet; for a person who is as chaotic as me, who struggles to be in control, it is an absolute necessity to follow these rules and routines. If I let myself go, nothing will get done. — Ingmar Bergman

They said you were mentally healthy, but your madness is the worst — Ingmar Bergman

I usually say I left puberty at 58. — Ingmar Bergman

Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure ... — Ingmar Bergman

Growing older is like climbing a mountain: the higher you get, the more strength you need, but the further you see. — Ingmar Bergman

If I don't create, I don't exist. — Ingmar Bergman

We make each other alive; it doesn't make a difference if it hurts. — Ingmar Bergman

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

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.' — Ingmar Bergman

Film as dream, film as 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, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. — Ingmar Bergman

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images. — Ingmar Bergman

Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. 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. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny each other's existence. 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

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

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

I want to confess as best I can, but my heart is void. The void is a mirror. I see my face and feel loathing and horror. My indifference to man has shut me out. I live now in a world of ghosts, a prisoner in my dreams. — Ingmar Bergman

When I'm on Faro, I'm never lonely. — Ingmar Bergman

The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world. — Ingmar Bergman

You never know when I'm lying. So it would be more practical to believe what I say
-Pauline in In the Presence of a Clown — 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

When you finish a film, you never want to see it again. — Ingmar Bergman

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