William Klein Quotes

When I lived in New York City, I loved it so much. But every six months, I had to go home to Texas to remember who I was. Get filled back up.

New York is, of course, many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

I wrote my first book without being to Ethiopia since I was two years old.

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.

I feel like my 50 years at Harvard were an interlude. I'm really a New Yorker.

I'm hanging out with my New York friends, my Jersey boys, my family and loving every single second of it.

Sometimes you have to step away from what you love in order to learn how to love it again.

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground; there are a thousand ways to go home again.

My mother was a Swede who grew up in Denmark. When I go there, I visit the street where she grew up and look at her house, which is still there, and the snowberry bush, from which she ate some berries and had to have her stomach pumped.

My family is Chilean, and I was born there. By the time I was four, we were living in San Antonio, Texas, and I just remember picking a blue bonnet and getting yelled at by some guy with a sheriff hat and a badge. I was traumatized. He told me it was the state flower, and I wasn't supposed to be messin' with it.

I figured New York was the closest I'd get here in America to Scotland.

When I was a kid, they used to say, 'Oh man, you don't ever wanna leave New York.' I don't ever want to stay in New York!

I spent a whole year in New York without going back to France. And I always came back because my mother was living in New York since I was 13. So I went to summer camps, hang out at the Roxy, go to class for ballet, so I always had part of my life in New York.

Only one thing is certain: every time I return to New York from Nashville, I walk down the streets with a silly grin, just smiling at everyone I see and, more often than not, receiving a suspicious glance in return... but honestly, I wouldn't have it any other way, y'all!

I'll always be a Brooklyn girl.

I love London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris - there are a million places I could imagine I like, but N.Y. is home.

1985 - That was my time in New York, and I have such poetic, fond memories.

Africa, help me to go home, carry me like an aged child in your arms. Undress me and wash me. Strip me of all of these garments, strip me as a man strips off dreams when the dawn comes. . . .

I lay puzzle as I backtrack to earlier times, Nothing's equivalent to the New York state of mind

You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

My favorite characters are people who think they're normal but they're not. I live in Baltimore, and it's full of people like that. I've also lived in New York, which is full of people who think they're crazy, but they're completely normal.

More than anything I want to be able to go back to Cuba, to have a house to visit there, to know my roots. Then, at last, I could sing for my people.

I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.

You meet a lot of people in New York who are different than you, and have different stories, so I see everyone as super individual.

I tend not to think that anything I happen to be reporting on in my films is special. Meaning that people are always saying to me, 'you must love New York, you have it in all your films.' But mostly it's because I know New York, and I know Brooklyn at this time. I know the lives there, because I have lived in them.