Quotes

[on working as a director] I've worked with more bad directors than good directors, and you learn by the bad ones because you find out how they destroy other peoples' fantasy life.

[on her frequent co-star, Max von Sydow] He is a friend I love dearly as perhaps you can only love someone you have worked with and known personally. It is a double relationship mixed into one. We haven't worked together for several years and I miss that very much.

Quick cuts and camera angles - they think that's film. That is not film. Film is to show people and life, and to make you know more about life than when you went in. It's not this cut, cut, cut, kill, kill, kill, sex, sex, sex...

The older one gets in this profession, the more people there are with whom one would never work again.

[on Ingrid Bergman] If possible, I admired the woman more than the actress.

I sometimes try to avoid conflict, so I agree instead of saying no.

On solitude: Sometimes it is less hard to wake up feeling lonely when you are alone than wake up feeling lonely when you are with someone.

On growth: Is this not where life's possibilities lie? Not necessarily to arrive, but always to be on the way, in movement.

On experience: What I have always loved most in men is imperfection. I get moved by the wrinkles on the throat of a man. It makes me love him more. I think it is sad that more women don't take the chance that maybe men will be moved by seeing the chin a little less firm than it used to be, that a man will be more in love with his wife because he remembers who she was and sees who she is and thinks, God, isn't that lovely that this happened to her. And be moved by life telling its story there.

When we were making Cries & Whispers (1972), none of the rest of us really knew what Harriet Andersson was doing in those scenes of suffering and death; Ingmar would send away everyone except just those few who must be there, and Harriet. When we saw the completed film, we were overwhelmed. It was almost as if those great scenes had been Harriet's secret - which, in a way, they were supposed to be, since in the film she died so much alone.

[on Ingmar Bergman] When I met him, I had been an actor for seven years and knew he was looked on as a genius. That's what I thought, too. So when he said he would really like to have me in a film, and wrote Persona (1966) for Bibi Andersson and me, I was aware I was to work with an incredible man. But I never knew it would mean I would be in 11 of his movies and direct some of his scripts. I had no idea it would mean a big change in my life.