William Klein

“Don't have rules, taboos, or limits.”

“If I didn't have to earn a living somehow, I would never have taken a fashion photograph in my life.”

“What's very funny is when you see amateurs filming something, they do some things no professionals would dare to do. They instinctively do things that are very avant-garde and useful.”

“Being an expatriate doesn't go down well in America.”

“I'm known for fashion photographs, but fashion photographs were mostly a joke for me. In 'Vogue,' girls were playing at being duchesses, but they were actually from Flatbush, Brooklyn. They would play duchesses, and I would play Cecil Beaton.”

“I'm an outsider, I guess.”

“Why did I take fashion photographs? I thought it was fun. And there was a lot of money.”

“I was making a film on Muhammad Ali in 1964, and I went to Miami to film everything around the fight for the world championship with Sonny Liston. I had the good luck of flying down to Miami, and there was one empty seat, and the guy sitting next to this empty seat was Malcolm X.”

“I thought it would be a good idea to look at New York with this half-European, half-native eye and really do something to get back at this city that I thought really gave me a hard time when I grew up.”

“I like film. I'm old fashioned.”

“If a film is a real knockout like 'Raging Bull,' it does not matter that it might not have happened like that.”

“I like the streets. I grew up in the streets.”

“I had no real respect for good technique because I didn't know what it was. I was self-taught, so that stuff didn't matter to me.”

“My grandfather and his wife came to America at the end of the 19th century from Hungary. Everyone started out on the Lower East Side. They became embourgeoise and would move to the Upper West Side. Then, if they'd make money, they'd move to Park Avenue. Their kids would become artists and move down to the Lower East Side and the Village.”

“When I made 'Polly Maggoo,' it was more or less the end of this collaboration with 'Vogue' because I made a caricature of the editor-in-chief and the fashion people, so they didn't really adore me.”

“The digital camera takes photographs in practically no light: it will dig out the least bit of light available. I was amazed to see the results of photographs that I wouldn't take ordinarily. That's the advantage of digital photography.”

“Leger was not only the first artist I ever met but also the first pop artist, and he blew our minds.”

“This is supposed to be the Big Apple, with neighborhoods where the houses are all good-looking and the skyscrapers and everything. But to me, New York is kind of shoddy and uncomfortable.”

“I like dark humor. I think the world is very funny and tragic, and my photographs are basically dark Jewish humor.”

“French photography was basically poetic, and mine was vulgar and brash and violent, except that there's never any violence in the photographs: it's only in the photographic style.”