Nastassja Kinski: Quotes about people

“I idealize my directors. It's true. I need to. I need to. I don't know if idealizing is a bad thing or good thing. But I just want to get up in the morning and work to get a glimpse of thing of his eyes searching things inside of me. For some I want to go to hell and to heaven. It hasn't happened with everybody. There are certain people I idealize. Others are very good, and I want to please them, too, but in a different sense of the word.”

Nastassja Kinski

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

People , Search , Hell , Sense

“I have never met a man like my father. He is so mad, terrible and vehement at the same time. Because of him, I never knew anything other than passion. When I began to meet other people I saw that it wasn’t normal.”

Nastassja Kinski

Georgina Howell, The Demanding Nastassia Kinski http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1309&dat=19860102&id=MQROAAAAIBAJ&sjid=MJwDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6682,494045, New Straits Times, January 2, 1986

People , Passion , Time , Madness

“In the past directors have always portrayed me as this strange girl who hardly talks but who has a great effect on people. They don't give me a chance to do something more, let more out of what is inside of me. The time is only coming up now when I feel I can open up. I have been almost a creature of these directors' imaginations. I guess that is what they saw in me and why they picked me. But if I was an object at moments in movies, I was also alive. I wasn't dead. I always gave everything I could while I worked. I could give maybe more today, but I gave what I could then.”

Nastassja Kinski

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

People , Feeling , Imagination , Girl

“I don't understand acting. Sometimes I only understand it while I'm doing it, and sometimes not even then. You cannot study acting. You can get new tools to use…, but you can't become something by studying, you just can't. You can become better. But some people can't even do that. They are best when they are very young because they are restless. When the restlessness settles, the acting goes. When acting goes for me, I'll just stop and do something else. I hope I always will get better and better, meaning bigger and bigger and more courageous and deeper and lighter and more flexible. But when it's time to go, it's time to go. There is no use trying to ride a wooden horse.”

Nastassja Kinski

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

People , Hope , Courage , Understanding

“Nudity in a picture is such a delicate thing, and it is so rarely right. But it can be right if it's done by people with beautiful vision and if it becomes part of the melody of the situation. The body, after all, is a beautiful and secret thing.”

Nastassja Kinski

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

People , Secret , Beauty , Parting

“My father loved us so much, but he's the kind of person that chokes you. He doesn't leave you your own pleasures. If you think or feel one way and he feels the other way, he won't accept it. My mother wanted to work. People wanted her to do movies, but he just wanted her to be at home, be a mother, be a wife, be this Venus, this planet he could land on anytime.”

Nastassja Kinski

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

Love , People , Pleasure , Way

“For everything that you do, there are people who appreciate your work and then there are those who don't. I think very few people have the guts to be sure of what they are doing, believe in it, and then go ahead and do it, irrespective of what people think.”

Nastassja Kinski

Interview with actress Nastassja Kinski, Indiantelevision.com, 23 August, 2003

People , Thinking

“I always fall in love with someone while I'm working in a film. It's a joy to get up in the morning. Sometimes when I'm not infatuated, I just make things up in my mind. Making a film is such an intense thing. You're eliminating everything in your life and you're absorbed into the world of the movie. It's exciting. It's like somebody saying you have an illness and you only have this short time to live. Then you live it that life is over with. Good-bye. You never see any of the people again. But meanwhile you have this short life in which you can do and feel and fantasize about all kinds of things because you know it will soon be over. So I always fall in love. Then you slip out of it, like a skin you take off, and you're naked and you're cold but it's exciting because there is going to be something new. My relationships are as intense and as giving and as short as my parts are. I would pump everything into a person. I would give my left arm that it was for life, but it dies so shortly. And when it dies, it doesn't even leave traces. The relationship vanishes into space. When I finish a part, it's the same feeling. I leave people and people leave me, I leave parts and parts leave me. I say it is 'the flow of life,' but it affects me terribly. Every once in a while I have such a breakdown, question every move.”

Nastassja Kinski

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

Love , Life , People , World

“My father is so expressive that things he feels even before they are thoughts are visible on his skin. He heats up. What other people work on, he was born with. He's got eyes like the sky and like hell at the same time. They're so clear and blue and alert and serious, and then they're like hell. That's how he is. He is total light and pureness and then hell. He gives totally or he gives nothing. He is like the sun, then an iceberg, then nonexistent, and then the sun again. Which is fine. It's a lot better than most people are.”

Nastassja Kinski

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

People , Feeling , Hell , Light

“I'm going to make myself seem more mysterious because I'm really not so mysterious. Or, if I am, it's because everybody is a mystery. Now that I'm older, at least I can be more amused by what people said.”

Nastassja Kinski

Movieline, April 1997

People