William Klein Quotes

When things are baffling they usually don't unbaffle themselves.There's just, you know, a certain amount of baffling stuff that always, like, really baffles you, and I've found that it's best to accept bafflement whenever it comes along, and then move on.

That's the way life is: meaning is always there, but there is no clearly given way of decoding it. Conventional cinema obscures this with an easy reduction of meaning to plot and schematic characters.

It is always the unreadable that occurs.

History, as well as life itself, is complicated; neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.

There's a lot of ambiguity in life, and so often, our art is very neatly wrapped up at the end, when our lives never feel that way.

Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.

Confusion is not an ignoble condition

My artistic approach is that you're supposed to be a little baffled.

If the world were clear, art would not exist.

There are always loose ends in real life.

The world is not always ours to understand.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Life is like that. We don't know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don't know.

Mystery hovers over all things here below.

In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.

Movies work, in my opinion, on the best level when they're more enigmatic, when we don't say it's this or that and where it raises more questions than answers.

Life doesn't have plots and subplots and denouements. It's just a big collection of loose ends and dangling threads that never get explained.

Life is and will ever remain an equation incapable of solution, but it contains certain known factors.

One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

The world's a puzzle; no need to make sense out of it." - Socrates

I've looked at life from both sides now...from win and lose, and still somehow it's life's illusions I recall I really don't know life at all.

The gray area, the place between black and white - that's the place where life happens.