Ingmar Bergman: There's always a tension in me between my urge to dest...

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

modern mind people

We worked on 'Fanny and Alexander' for seven months and it was an amusing production. Still, it was very long and heavy and so awfully complicated, .. And when the premiere was over and everything went well, I thought, 'That's that.' .

Ingmar Bergman

seven-months amusement long

I want to stop. I want to stay on Fårö, and read the books I haven’t read, find out things I haven’t yet found out. I want to write things I haven’t written. To listen to music, and talk to my neighbors. To live together with my wife a very calm, very secure, very lazy existence, for the rest of my life.

Ingmar Bergman

wife writing book

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

Ingmar Bergman

bergman manage

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

Ingmar Bergman

nothing look love window

The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times, and create panic and terror. But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage.

Ingmar Bergman

demons i-can work negative

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

isolation ego pain artist

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

Ingmar Bergman

pictures emotions dreams thinking

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

gangster true walk eyes

There is something joyous about not talking.

Ingmar Bergman

about something not-talking talking

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-am loneliness light sea

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

Ingmar Bergman

face me cinema important

I am very shy with people I don't know.

Ingmar Bergman

i-am know shy people

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

man childhood today night

If I don't create, I don't exist.

Ingmar Bergman

exist create

I usually say I left puberty at 58.

Ingmar Bergman

say puberty left

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

thought police waiting fame

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

Ingmar Bergman

me left creativity anger

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

Ingmar Bergman

i-am my-life bird life

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

Ingmar Bergman

my-life day life death

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.