Federico Fellini Quotes

I want to tell you a story. I have no other vanity.

Everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait.

Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.

Start telling the stories that only you can tell.

My music is about my life. If it's something that I've lived, then it's something that I've written about.

Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity, it will be universal.

If you're going to write about your life, you must write about your life.

I'm not interested in someone's credits. Let me see who you are, and tell me a story of your life.

I just know what I go through, and I know how to speak on it in an interesting way.

There's always an element of truth to what I write because that's why I write.

I read a quote to the effect that we are always writing about ourselves no matter what we're doing. That may be so.

When writing about oneself, one must strive to be truthful. Truth is more important than modesty.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

In my opinion, trying to guess what readers want is the wrong approach. You have to tell your story as best you can and as true to yourself as possible. You have to be honest and fair and vulnerable and foolish and brave, and not care what anyone thinks of it.

Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism.

I love helping someone else tell their story, but I like being the storyteller sometimes.

Because Dickens and Dostoyevsky and Woody Guthrie were telling their stories much better than I ever could, I decided to stick to my own mind.

I'm just singing about my own life. Singing about all the little stories in my life and the things I've been through.

The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

I write every day, for most of the day, so it's just about turning into metaphor whatever's going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience.

When you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about.

The question isn't, 'What do we want to know about people?', It's, 'What do people want to tell about themselves?'

When I lead essay workshops, I ask students to come up with at least five topics, which they'll narrow down to one. The winning idea should be the story the student is most excited to tell because it honestly reflects his or her best self.