All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Fellini’s aphorism argues that creative work inevitably bears the imprint of its maker’s life. Even when an artist aims at fiction, spectacle, or abstraction, the choices of subject, tone, and form arise from personal memory, temperament, and desire. The metaphor of the pearl sharpens the point: a pearl is produced when an oyster coats an irritant with nacre, transforming discomfort into something luminous. Likewise, art can be understood as a transmutation of lived experience—often including wounds, obsessions, and private longings—into a crafted object that can be shared. The line also implies that interpretation should attend to the maker’s inner history without reducing the artwork to mere confession.