I'm deeply fixated on my childhood. Some impressions are extremely vivid, light, smell, and all. There are moments when I can wander through my childhood's landscape, through rooms long ago, remember how they were furnished, where the pictures hung on the walls, the way the light fell. It's like a film–little scraps of a film, which I set running and which I can reconstruct to the last detail–except their smell.

No other art-medium–neither painting nor poetry–can communicate the specific quality of the dream as well as the film can. When the lights go down in the cinema and this white shining point opens up for us, our gaze stops flitting hither and thither, settles and becomes quite steady. We just sit there, letting the images flow out over us. Our will ceases to function. We lose our ability to sort things out and fix them in their proper places. We're drawn into a course of events–we're participants in a dream. And manufacturing dreams, that's a juicy business.

For a long time I go about with one or two ideas in my head, gathering material, making notes, and so on. Since I've always been busy with so many things, I've had to be methodical about the way I divide up my working time. I know a time will come when I shall be able to say: 'Now I've got six or eight weeks, when I can write my script.' So it's all planned well in advance. Then all I have to do is to sit down and make a start. After which the writing of the script goes on in a very, very methodical, very disciplined, very pedantic fashion.

My basic view of things is–not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer.

It's not often I depict current events. Take, for instance, that poem which introduces Persona and depicts a situation at a particular moment. Art used to be able to be an act of political incitement, it could suggest a political action. Today art, in this respect, has completely played itself out. Political activity today is precipitated by the news, by television's immediate closeness to what is going on all over the world. In this respect art has missed the boat completely. Artists are hardly the social visionaries they used to be. And they mustn't imagine they are! Reality is running away from artists and their political visions.

Strindberg has followed me all my life. Sometimes I've felt deeply attracted to him, sometimes repelled....he expressed things which I'd experienced and which I couldn't find words for.

I realize how exposed actors are. They are the ones, always, who go on to the stage, or before the camera. Who have to strip themselves naked down to their very skeleton. We're protected. We can always make a grimace or resort to some verbal evasion. They can't. They can neither run away, nor explain things away. They just have to stand there, with their bodies and their faces. That's why the only respectable and decent thing to do seems to me always, unswervingly, unshakably, to stand up for my actors.