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

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

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

I have such difficulty calming down - my stomach, my head, reality, everything. That is the reason I live in Faro.

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.

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

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?

I would have been happier if I'd been anonymous.

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

We make an idol of our fear and that idol we call God.

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.

I usually say I left puberty at 58.

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

I make all my decisions on intuition.

There are so many books I want to read. Difficult books. That's what I intend to do and what I'm longing for.

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

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

Faith is a torment, did you know that? It is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.

My play opens with an actor walking down into the audience, where he strangles the critic, then reads aloud from a little black book all the humiliations he has noted therein. Then he throws up on the audience, after which he exits and puts a bullet through his head.

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

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.

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

I always work with 18 friends.

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

I shall remember this moment: the silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries, the bowl of milk. Your faces in the evening light.[...] I shall carry this memory carefully in my hands as if it were a bowl brimful of fresh milk. It will be a sign to me, and a great sufficiency.

Necessary illusions enable us to live.

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

If I let myself go, nothing will get done.

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.

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.

When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It's like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.

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

The only thing I consider appalling would be to suddenly become a vegetable and a burden on other people. A soul slowly dying out, trapped in a body in which the insides gradually sabotage me - that, I think, would be terrifying.

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

Everyone likes happiness, no one likes pain. But you can't have a rainbow without a little rain.

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.

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.

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.

I hope I never get so old I get religious.

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.

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 had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can't for a moment be equal to the suffering you've caused.

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.

I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. 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.

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

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

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

I am forever living in my childhood.

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