William Klein Quotes

If you're so afraid of your imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you imagine heaven?

People have talents that are different. Where does the creative flow come from - inside us or from a higher power? I don't ask any questions. I just write it down.

I think Balanchine and Robbins talk to God and when I call, he's out to lunch.

The key to being a wonderful writer is not to write. You just get out of the way. Leave room for God to walk in the room. And when I write something that I know is right, I get on my knees and say 'thank you.'

He ne'er is crowned with immortality Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

I never question what to do, it tells me what to do. The photographs make themselves with my help.

There's a relationship between music and spirituality and inspiration and to a certain extent improvisation that draws me in, because I don't totally understand it. I know that those relationships have been telling me, since I started making records, where to go. What to write down.

I stay away from the arts... writing songs, being creative - those are downloads from God. You can't do data analytics on art.

I think God gave me an inner dictionary. If you play the right music that my heart loves, lyrics just come right to me.

Sometimes you have the feeling that some little imp is standing behind you and dictating to you, but he gives it to you slowly, drop by drop.

The subject gives you the best idea of how to make a photograph. So I just wait for something to happen.

That frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject, you cannot do it by not being lost yourself.

You either have an imaginative mind or you don't. All of my writing is God-given. I don't write my stories - they write themselves.

I'm not a particularly religious person, but that feeling of getting transmissions from someplace else, even if it's from your own consciousness, is very, very real. To me, at least.

You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.

People go, 'What do you want to do?' What do you want to do? What are you feeling? Going into a shoot not fully knowing what I want to do—that excitement, that thing that happens, is just so powerful and makes such great pictures.

I photograph continuously, often without a good idea or strong feelings. During this time the photos are nearly all poor, but I believe they develop my seeing and help later on in other photos. I do believe strongly in photography and hope by following it intuitively that when the photographs are looked at they will touch the spirit in people.

The photographer in my head says: Give me peace. Flash. Give me release. Flash.

To be creative is to worship. To be creative is to participate in the great process of creation - and participating in creativity is participating in God.

Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.

All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.

What a fine line there is between artistry and insanity. There's no formula for it, and I think a lot of people when they're around you - even those closest to you - when you're in that whirl of creativity and you're grabbing those things out of the air, there's no rational process.

I'm a believer. I don't go to church. I don't belong to any particular religion, but I do believe in God. I couldn't write what I write about and be creative without a certain form of belief.