Quotes from the film:
Writer: It's better to destroy than create what's unnecessary.
Claudia: I don't understand. He meets a girl that can give him a new life and he pushes her away?
Guido: Because he no longer believes in it.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.
Guido: Because it isn't true that a woman can change a man.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.
Guido: And above all because I don't feel like telling another pile of lies.
Claudia: Because he doesn't know how to love.
Guido: I thought my ideas were so clear. I wanted to make an honest film. No lies whatsoever. I thought I had something so simple to say. Something useful to everybody. A film that could help bury forever all those dead things we carry within ourselves. Instead, I'm the one without the courage to bury anything at all. When did I go wrong? I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same.
Fellini Quotes:
“I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.”
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”
“A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.”
“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography”
“Even if I set out to make a film about a fillet of sole, it would be about me.”
“Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can't teach old fleas new dogs.”
“What is an artist? 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—which is really the realm of the artist.”
“It's easier to be faithful to a restaurant than it is to a woman.”
“Realism is a bad word. In a sense everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real.”
“The artist is the medium between his fantasies and the rest of the world. ”
Some links:
Fellini on 8 1/2 (Criterion Collection essay)An excerpt from I, Fellini (From the Criterion Collection, again)
