Klaus Kinski Quotes

Klaus Kinski offers raw, angry musings about criticism, film and the fury of war.

30 quotes

1. One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.

2. 'I am like a wild animal born in captivity, in a zoo. But where a beast would have claws, I was born with talent.'

3. I need love! Love! Non-stop! And I want to give love because I have so much of it. No one understands the sole purpose of my whoring is to spend myself totally.

4. 'If you always need money like I do, then you can't be selective about movies. They're all just one big heap of nonsense.'

5. I wish I'd never been an actor. I'd rather have been a streetwalker, selling my body, than selling my tears and my laughter, my grief and my joy.

6. Making Movies is better than cleaning toilets.

7. Herzog is a miserable, hateful malevolent, avaricious, money-hungry, nasty, sadistic, treacherous, blackmailing, cowardly, thoroughly dishonest creep.

8. He should be thrown alive to the crocodiles! An anaconda should strangle him slowly! A poisonous spider should sting him and paralyze his lungs! The most venomous serpent should bite him and make his brain explode! No! panther claws should rip open his throat- that would be much too good for him! No! The huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes and gobble up his balls and his guts! He should catch the plague! Syphilis! Malaria! Yellow fever! Leprosy! It's no use; the more I wish him the most gruesome deaths, the more he haunts me.

9. His speech is clumsy, with a toadlike indolence, long winded, pedantic, choppy. The words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain snot. Then he writhes in painful ecstasy, as if he had sugar on his rotten teeth. A very slow blab machine. An obsolete model with a non-working switch- it can't be turned off unless you cut off the electric power altogether. So I'd have to smash him in the kisser. No, I'd have to knock him unconscious. But even if he were unconscious he'd keep talking. Even if his vocal cords were sliced through, he'd keep talking like a ventriloquist. Even if his throat were cut and his head were chopped off, speech balloons would still dangle from his mouth like gases emitted by internal decay.

10. Nobody is going to buy the book if I say nice things about you, Werner.

11. About 25 years ago, I was in an apartment, and next door, they put on the radio, so I struck the wall with my fist, but they did not put the radio down. I took a tool and banged until I made a hole through the wall. It was like a comedy movie.

12. Once, I took a taxi. I hate those limousines. They stink and their drivers have been driving dead people to the cemeteries.

13. I didn't choose solitude.

14. You don't need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.

15. What do you think, that a dollar in a savings account is freedom? Maybe you have understood nothing I have said.

16. Put a bird cage near the window so that the bird can see the sky? It's much better to look than not to, even if it hurts.

17. It is the Nobel Prize I want. It's worth $400,000.

18. I've solved the mystery: You have to submit silently. Open up, let go. Let anything penetrate you, even the most painful things. Endure. Bear up. That's the magic key! The text comes by itself, and its meaning shakes the soul ... You mustn't let scar tissue form on your wounds; you have to keep ripping them open in order to turn your insides into a marvelous instrument that is capable of anything. All this has its price.

19. When you are there, you are. With words, you aren't.

20. But words - words are not enough!

21. I am not the Jesus of the official church tolerated by those in power. I am not your superstar.

22. I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even, and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years.

23. I didn't want to be alone, but I had to learn that the dimensions of my feelings are too violent. I had to learn this.

24. I have to shoot without any breaks. I yell at Herzog and hit him. I have to fight for every sequence. I wish Herzog would catch the plague, more than ever.

25. In a way, everything concerning a movie leaves me cold.

26. I actually get venereal disease more often than most people catch colds.

27. The street kid in me says, "Grab the money and run - who cares who it's from! Don't think about whatever you have to do for it or when you have to do it!

28. The flamenco of the Gypsy has nothing to do with the flamenco for tourists. Real flamenco is like sex.

29. Whenever I was with a woman, I always sort of want another one. So there was always another one. I can't explain this, but it means that these women, they were not sharing my solitude.

30. I make movies for money, exclusively for money.