Quotes from Krzysztof Kieslowski

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.

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.

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

It's not interesting to achieve; the ways of achievement are interesting.

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

I can't imagine life without Poland. I find it very hard to find a place for myself in the West.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

It's with pleasure that I'm putting film-making aside. I never enjoyed making films. I didn't like the whole film world - an invented, unreal world whose values are completely different to those I'm used to.

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

Things have changed for the worse. That's why former eastern bloc countries are electing communists again. We are missing them and longing for the times we cursed before.

I am trained as a film-maker. There is nothing else I can do.

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.

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

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.

There are mysteries, secret zones in each individual.