Federico Fellini Quotes

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

You don't know what inspires you. You like to think you know what inspires you, but in the final analysis I don't think you really do. It's great to look at a blank sheet of paper, you know, and walk up to an instrument and not know what's gonna happen. It's the most challenging thing I do.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

It's good to wander into the studio and walk out with something that's better than you'd imagined it to be. If everything was as you imagined it to be, it just wouldn't be as much fun.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

Producing a series is like being Lewis and Clark: You know where you're going, you just don't know how you're going to get there. When people say, 'You should create a bible for your show,' I say, 'You don't want a bible. It'll prevent you from making discoveries along the way.' And that's what happened on 'The X-Files.'

People ask me, 'What's your next film?' And I never know.

You walk on a set, and you have no idea - that's why I don't storyboard. It's all possible.

I think all my films have a different journey. Therefore, I take it as it comes.

Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.

If I knew what the picture was going to be like I wouldn’t make it. It was almost like it was made already – the challenge is more about trying to make what you can’t think of.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

Art is the act of navigating without a map.

Here's the truth you have to wrestle with: the reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can't tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there'd be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map. Don't you hate that? I love that there's no map.

I cant duplicate my own successes, because part of the creation of that effect is making something happen that you didn't expect

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I had no idea what I was doing when I wrote 'Search.' There was no carefully designed work plan. There was no theory that I was out to prove.

I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.

I know Charlie Kaufman really well, for instance. Charlie Kaufman starts a story, and he has no freaking idea where he's going. None. Zero. And he doesn't want to know, because there's a little bit of death in that.