Top 100 Werner Herzog Quotes
#1. Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It's an ego trip, and I'm not on an ego trip. I don't have ambitions - I have a vision.
Werner Herzog
#2. There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone.
Werner Herzog
#3. I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.
Werner Herzog
#4. You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.
Werner Herzog
#5. There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.
Werner Herzog
#6. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Werner Herzog
#7. It is only through writing that I become myself
Werner Herzog
#8. You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.
Werner Herzog
#9. May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.
Werner Herzog
#10. I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.
Werner Herzog
#11. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
Werner Herzog
#12. If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn't matter whether you're bold or cowardly, or whether you're stupid or intelligent. Doesn't get you anywhere.
Werner Herzog
#13. Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.
Werner Herzog
#14. I'm quite convinced that cooking is the only alternative to film making. Maybe there's also another alternative, that's walking on foot.
Werner Herzog
#15. Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.
Werner Herzog
#17. I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.
Werner Herzog
#18. Without dreams we would be cows in a field, and I don't want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.
Werner Herzog
#19. Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.
Werner Herzog
#20. I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.
Werner Herzog
#21. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
Werner Herzog
#22. I'm a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done.
Werner Herzog
#23. We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.
Werner Herzog
#24. I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.
Werner Herzog
#25. I'm not very eager to sit and look at my films all the time.
Werner Herzog
#26. You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.
Werner Herzog
#27. I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.
Werner Herzog
#28. I'm not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming - I've always been a man of the theaters.
Werner Herzog
#29. But the question that everyone wanted answered was whether I would have the nerve and the strength to start the whole process from scratch. I said yes; otherwise I would be someone who had no dream left, and without dreams I would not want to live.
Werner Herzog
#30. I love nature, but against my better judgment.
Werner Herzog
#31. There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance.
Werner Herzog
#33. Once in a while I come across a director who hasgrown up thousands of miles from me, and the work touches me.Through these issues/50/images I am connected and something is illuminated.And I know then that I am not alone.
Werner Herzog
#34. Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.
Werner Herzog
#35. If you're purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn't illuminate.
Werner Herzog
#36. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
Werner Herzog
#37. I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!
Werner Herzog
#38. Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, 'I would plant an apple tree today.' This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.
Werner Herzog
#39. It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.
Werner Herzog
#40. Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are.
Werner Herzog
#41. I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.
Werner Herzog
#42. A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.
Werner Herzog
#43. In my films, I hope there are a few moments where you feel almost illuminated, like in a state of ecstasy, stepping out of yourself, beyond yourself and perceiving something which is only, in the case of cinema, possible in collective dreams.
Werner Herzog
#44. Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.
Werner Herzog
#45. I live my life outside of the glitz and glamour of the red carpet events, and so you'll never see me there. I'm never at parties.
Werner Herzog
#46. I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare.
Werner Herzog
#47. I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.
Werner Herzog
#48. I don't care whether the person is guilty or not guilty. It's not my business to establish guilt or innocence. It's a court of law that does that and a jury does that, but not me.
Werner Herzog
#50. I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.
Werner Herzog
#51. At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey - it looked like a naked child.
Werner Herzog
#52. The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[ ... ]
Werner Herzog
#53. I have nothing against 3D films but I do not need to see them.
Werner Herzog
#54. Women have a very good sense for seeing instantly what constitutes a good man. Not physically. The physical strength is only a small side of it.
Werner Herzog
#55. I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.
Werner Herzog
#56. My contacts with the film industry can be described in very simple terms: The industry does not really need me, and I do not really need the industry.
Werner Herzog
#57. I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you're working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.
Werner Herzog
#58. I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.
Werner Herzog
#59. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.
Werner Herzog
#60. If you don't have a deal in two days, you won't have a deal in two years
Werner Herzog
#61. I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals.
Werner Herzog
#63. Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read ... if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.
Werner Herzog
#64. One more thing: Philippe, you are not a coward-so what I want to hear from you is the ecstatic truth about the twin towers.
Werner Herzog
#65. Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.
Werner Herzog
#66. In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.
Werner Herzog
#67. I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure.
Werner Herzog
#70. I see planets that don't exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed.
Werner Herzog
#71. Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technological civilisation makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.
Werner Herzog
#72. In Germany, you would be hanged if you cracked a joke about Hitler and you would be killed by the state if you were insane in a project of euthanasia.
Werner Herzog
#73. I never planned my career in steps. It's all coming at me like burglars in the night.
Werner Herzog
#74. Yes, the pyramids have been built, but if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and give me 30 years, I could build a bigger one.
Werner Herzog
#75. For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films.
Werner Herzog
#76. The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendor.
Werner Herzog
#77. We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.
Werner Herzog
#78. If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
Werner Herzog
#79. Perseverance has kept me going over the years. Things rarely happen overnight. Filmmakers should be prepared for many years of hard work. The sheer toil can be healthy and exhilarating.
Werner Herzog
#80. Some of the most important caves, like Lascaux in the Dordogne region in France, have had to be closed down. There had been too many people allowed in, and they left a mold on the walls that is spreading and which can't really be stopped.
Werner Herzog
#81. Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me ... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal.
Werner Herzog
#83. I despise formal restaurants. I find all of that formality to be very base and vile. I would much rather eat potato chips on the sidewalk.
Werner Herzog
#84. THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.
Werner Herzog
#85. Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set,
Werner Herzog
#86. In a way, I managed to get the deepest things, the best things out of people. That's why I'm a filmmaker. If you don't have it in you, you'd better do something else.
Werner Herzog
#87. I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books.
Werner Herzog
#88. I function better in the jungle in Amazonia or Antarctica or Alaska or the Sahara desert. An artificial environment like a studio has never attracted me. I could work in a studio, but I would never really feel at home.
Werner Herzog
#89. It happens sometimes that the material itself carries things you have not fully planned. The footage has its own right, its own life, its own vibrancy and energy in it.
Werner Herzog
#90. Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
Werner Herzog
#91. The universe is not harmonious: you know that by looking outside.
Werner Herzog
#92. One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.
Werner Herzog
#93. I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.
Werner Herzog
#94. I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.
Werner Herzog
#95. Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs.
Werner Herzog
#96. I'm not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together.
Werner Herzog
#97. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.
Werner Herzog
#98. Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, Internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion.
Werner Herzog
#99. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
Werner Herzog
#100. I am so used to plunging into the unknown that any other surroundings and form of existence strike me as exotic and unsuitable for human beings.
Werner Herzog
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