Ingmar Bergman

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

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

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.

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.

I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.

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

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 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 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.'

I dream about doing a film about once a week.

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

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