Krzysztof Kieslowski Quotations

Do people really want liberty, equality, fraternity? Is it not some manner of speaking?

I like chance meetings - life is full of them. Every day, without realising it, I pass people whom I should know.

Maybe it is worth investigating the unknown, if only because the very feeling of not knowing is a painful one.

To tell you the truth, in my work, love is always in opposition to the elements. It creates dilemmas. It brings in suffering. We can't live with it, and we can't live without it. You'll rarely find a happy ending in my work.

The television industry doesn't like to see the compexity of the world. It prefers simple reporting, with simple ideas: this is white, that's black; this is good, that's bad.

For me optimism is two lovers walking into the sunset arm in arm. Or maybe into the sunrise - whatever appeals to you.

I believe the life of every person is worthy of scrutiny, containing its own secrets and dramas.

In believing too much in rationality, our contemporaries have lost something.

Of course I'd like to get beyond the concrete. But it's really difficult. Very difficult.

There are mysteries, secret zones in each individual.

I was happy when I got into film school. I'd simply satisfied my ambition to show them that I could get in - nothing else - although I do believe they shouldn't have accepted me. I was a complete idiot. I can't understand why they took me. Probably because I'd tried three times.

Different people in different parts of the world can be thinking the same thoughts at the same time. It's an obsession of mine: that different people in different places are thinking the same thing but for different reasons. I try to make films which connect people.

In real life, there are names that surprise us because they don't seem to suit the person at all.

Someone knocks at the door of an apartment to borrow salt or sugar, people run into each other in the elevator, and in this way become inscribed in the spectator's memory.

I really don't know anything about music, and it's no great experience for me. But I do think that music has a purifying element.

We're always looking at this love through the eyes of the person who is suffering because of this love.

Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.

If I have a goal, then it is to escape from this literalism. I'll never achieve it; in the same way that I'll never manage to describe what really dwells within my character, although I keep on trying.

I have no problem being with people of different nationalities.

I have one good characteristic: I'm a pessimist, so I always imagine the worst - always. To me, the future is a black hole.

We all steal, but if we're smart we steal from great directors. Then, we can call it influence.

The relationship between the films and the individual Commandments [is] a tentative one. The films should be influenced by the individual Commandments to the same degree that the Commandments influence our daily lives.

For 6,000 years, these rules have been unquestionably right. And yet we break them every day. People feel that something is wrong in life. There is some kind of atmosphere that makes people now turn to other values. They want to contemplate the basic questions of life, and that is probably the real reason for wanting to tell these stories.

I feel Polish. More specifically, I feel like I'm from the tiny village in the Northeast of Poland where I have a house and where I love to spend time. But I don't work there. I cut wood.

We understand the concept of equality, that we all want to be equal. But I think this is absolutely not true. I don't think anybody really wants to be equal. Everybody wants to be more equal.

I wanted to describe the world at the same time, through image, express what I felt. It was the time of the great documentary filmmakers: Richard Leacock, Joris Ivens. Today, television has put an end to this type of filmmaking.

Interior liberty is universal.

(When asked what a director does) I help.

I like chance meetings--life is full of them. Everyday, without realizing it, I pass people whom I should know. At this moment, in this cafe, we're sitting next to strangers. Everyone will get up, leave, and go on their own way. And they'll never meet again. And if they do, they won't realize that it's not for the first time.

In ten phrases, the ten commandments express the essential of life. And these three words--liberty, equality, and fraternity--do just as much. Millions of people have died for those ideals.

Of course, you could, no doubt, call my going to film school the biggest mistake I ever made.

That's the greatest sin a director can commit; to make a film simply because he wants to make a film.

This man (Bergman) is one of the few film directors-perhaps the only one in the world-to have said as much about human nature as Dostoevsky or Camus.

You have to want to make a film for other reasons - to say something, to tell a story, to show somebody's fate - but you can't want to make a film simply for the sake of it.

The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film.

I have one good characteristic: I'm a pessimist, so I always imagine the worst - always. To me, the future is a black hole.

Real artists find answers. The knowledge of the artisan is within the confines of his skills. For example, I know a lot about lenses, about the editing room. I know what the different buttons on the camera are for. I know more or less how to use a microphone. I know all that, but that's not real knowledge. Real knowledge is knowing how to live, why we live, things like that.

You make films to give people something, to transport them somewhere else, and it doesn't matter if you transport them to a world of intuition or a world of intellect...The realm of superstitions, fortune-telling, presentiments, intuition, dreams, all this is the inner life of a human being, and all this is the hardest thing to film... I've been trying to get there from the beginning. I'm somebody who doesn't know, somebody who's searching.

The films should be influenced by the individual commandments to the same degree that the commandments influence our daily lives.