A created thing is never invented and it is never true: it is always and ever itself.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that creativity is a unique expression rather than a mere reproduction of reality.
Fellini's quote suggests that every act of creation is inherently original and self-referential. It implies that while creators draw from experiences and realities, what they produce transcends mere imitation to become its own entity, embodying the essence of its creation. Rather than aiming to be 'true' to life or to a concept, art and created things should be appreciated for their individuality and the distinct perspective they offer.
In practice
During a lecture on the nature of art, one might use this quote to illustrate the concept of originality.
I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.
Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second, and you can hop from one place to another. It's a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.
No critic writing about a film could say more than the film itself, although they do their best to make us think the oppposite.
What's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.
We can all pretend to be cynical and scheming, but when we’re faced with purity and innocence, the cynical mask drops off.
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one... It’s this in-between that I’m calling a province, this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one - which is really the realm of the artist.
How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?
The most important thing to realise is that everyone is capable of telling a story. It doesn't matter where we were born or how we grew up.
Out of all the guitars in the whole world, the Fender Mustang is my favorite. They're cheap and totally inefficient, and they sound like crap and are very small.
Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.
What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.
There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts.
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