Ingmar Bergman

Art must disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.

Death is not the end; it's the silence after the music.

I am not a pessimist; I am a realist with a sense of humor.

The cinema is an art form that lies about life as it is.

Love and death are the two great themes of all art.

In silence, we hear the voice of God—or the devil.

Every film is a battle against time and memory.

The artist's life is one of constant self-exile.

Humor is the oxygen of the soul in dark times.

We create to escape the nothingness that awaits us.

The director is the invisible hand guiding the visible world.

Life's meaning is found in the questions, not the answers.

In the theatre, the audience breathes with you; in film, they dream alone.

My films are confessions disguised as stories.

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 dusky chambers of our souls.

I want to be one of the artists who can make a film that is not a document, but a dream.

I work with human beings, with their faces, their voices, their bodies, their gestures, their movements. I am interested in what they do, what they think, what they feel, what they dream.

My films are an expression of my inner self, my dreams, my fears, my hopes, my beliefs, my doubts.

The demon that has followed me my entire life is the need to communicate. I have always wanted to reach out and touch people, to make them feel what I feel, to see what I see.

For me, the cinema is a language. It can say things that cannot be said in any other way.