Nastassja Kinski

"I always fall in love with someone while Im working in a film. Its a joy to get up in the morning. Sometimes when Im not infatuated, I just make things up in my mind. Making a film is such an intense thing. Youre eliminating everything in your life and youre absorbed into the world of the movie. Its exciting. Its 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 youre naked and youre cold but its 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 doesnt even leave traces. The relationship vanishes into space. When I finish a part, its 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."

"In the past directors have always portrayed me as this strange girl who hardly talks but who has a great effect on people. They dont 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 wasnt dead. I always gave everything I could while I worked. I could give maybe more today, but I gave what I could then."

"It started out as a light romance, but he became demanding and possessive."

"My mother and I have this really strangely close relationship. No other relationship can come close to it. Its frightening. Even when Im in a relationship with a man, I compare it to my relationship with my mother. She is a friend, but she is still a mother, and everything a mother needs to be, she is. She is really observing and caring and doesnt want anything but giving because its her joy. Even when I cant bear anybody, not even myself, she s like the sun coming up to me. She dedicated all her life to me. Sometimes I feel that she gave her life to me and now its my job to maybe take her somewhere. But what is it she doesnt know? She knows things I couldnt begin to know. Yet she is so fresh with ideas which I already take for granted. She sometimes wakes me up and says, Dont you see? and she makes me see and feel things again. Nobody, not my father, not anybody, has done that for me, except movies."

"He was always there when I needed him and someone I could talk too and argue with. In a Freudian way he was the father I never had. For me, partners were like father figures most of the time."

"The period Im going through now is a transition. You know when youre in the middle of puberty and you dont know what to do with yourself? I feel like that now, It will be a transition into something very good if I work hard enough at it. But it is a frustration and an emptiness and a lack of confidence now. I feel young and I feel old. I feel twenty years below zero and old. I put a lot of demands on myself to know this and that, to be here and there. Ive got to really do one thing at a time all the way. Ive got stop wanting to know and do everything at the same time. Its like you have a home stuffed with beautifull things - statues, books, lamps - that give a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and you have nothing. And then you go into a house where there isnt a great light and one object and you could sit there all your life studying it, and one discovery about the object would give birth to the next, and it would be totally fulfilling. Right now my life is cluttered and you cant run away from it. If I werent attached to this body I would have left it long ago."