Life & Mortality Quote by Klaus Kinski

Klaus Kinski doesn’t just dislike a mode of transport; he turns a mundane preference into a little horror film about class, death, and performance. The opening move is classic Kinski: “Once, I took a taxi” lands like a confessional, almost tender in its ordinariness, before he swerves into disgust. “I hate those limousines” reads as anti-glamour, a rejection of the cushioned celebrity pipeline. For an actor whose persona was famously combustible, the line is a way of insisting he’s not to be handled, not to be packaged.

Then he spikes it with sensory insult: “They stink.” That bluntness matters. It drags the limo down from symbol to body, from status to smell, from fantasy to something trapped and stale. The punchline is the grotesque leap: limo drivers “have been driving dead people to the cemeteries.” Kinski weaponizes the idea that luxury is adjacent to mourning: the same black car, the same uniformed chauffeur, the same practiced silence. The implication is that limousines rehearse death etiquette. They’re not just vehicles; they’re props for a certain kind of social ritual, where emotions get upholstered and contained.

Contextually, it plays like an anti-celebrity quip from a man who treated interviews as combat. Subtext: the industry’s prestige is funereal, and anyone who comfortably rides in it is already consenting to a kind of spiritual embalming. Kinski chooses the taxi as a messy, human alternative: anonymous, imperfect, alive.