Top 100 Quotes About Werner Herzog
#1. Has Werner Herzog ever said anything that wasn't true? What a brilliant fountain of wisdom. Everything he touches I'm just fascinated by.
Dan Gilroy
#3. Our repartee would be rich with subtlety and sarcasm, as smart and funny as midcareer Woody Allen. Our fucking, like Werner Herzog, serious and perplexing.
Ottessa Moshfegh
#4. On working with director Werner Herzog: I have to shoot without any breaks. I yell at Herzog and hit him. I have to fight for every sequence. I wish Herzog would catch the plague.
Klaus Kinski
#5. I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.
Ava DuVernay
#6. There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him.
Finn Jones
#7. South Africa had very poor repertory distribution. I didn't find out about Akira Kurosawa and Tarkovsky and Werner Herzog until I got to the U.K.
Richard Stanley
#8. Pretty much everyone on my iPod, I'd like to be friends with. But I'd say that the main two that I'd love to get into a conversation with, are Werner Herzog and Graham Hancock.
Finn Jones
#9. In my life, I wanted to meet certain people. I never met Charlie Chaplin, but I met Werner Herzog.
Philippe Petit
#10. I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be Werner Herzog.
Werner Herzog
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.
Werner Herzog
#14. I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.
Werner Herzog
#15. You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.
Werner Herzog
#16. 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
#17. I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.
Werner Herzog
#18. The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.
Werner Herzog
#19. I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.
Werner Herzog
#20. It is only through writing that I become myself
Werner Herzog
#21. 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
#22. If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!
Werner Herzog
#23. I work very fast and steadily, and I don't hardly ever notice that I'm working. It feels like just breathing or walking when I do films.
Werner Herzog
#24. May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.
Werner Herzog
#25. What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.
Werner Herzog
#26. 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
#27. The chicken's still dancing
the chicken won't stop
Sarah Kane
#28. I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.
Werner Herzog
#29. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
Werner Herzog
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.
Werner Herzog
#33. 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
#34. Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.
Werner Herzog
#36. Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
Werner Herzog
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.
Werner Herzog
#41. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
Werner Herzog
#42. I'm a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done.
Werner Herzog
#43. We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.
Werner Herzog
#44. I am torn between the beauty of the natural world, which you see all around us, and the idea that some dumb tornado could blow a telephone pole onto my sweet Camaro.
Werner Herzog
#45. I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.
Werner Herzog
#46. I'm not very eager to sit and look at my films all the time.
Werner Herzog
#47. You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.
Werner Herzog
#48. 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
#49. Money doesn't make films. You just do it and take the initiative.
Werner Herzog
#50. I'm not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming - I've always been a man of the theaters.
Werner Herzog
#51. 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
#52. I love nature, but against my better judgment.
Werner Herzog
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.
Werner Herzog
#57. 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
#58. If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place.
Werner Herzog
#59. 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
#60. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
Werner Herzog
#61. I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!
Werner Herzog
#62. Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.
Werner Herzog
#63. 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
#64. Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.
Werner Herzog
#65. 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
#66. I'm simply not afraid. It's not in my dictionary of behaviour.
Werner Herzog
#67. When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.
Werner Herzog
#68. I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with.
Werner Herzog
#69. James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.
Werner Herzog
#70. You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.
Werner Herzog
#71. 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
#72. I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.
Werner Herzog
#73. 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
#74. Nothing I have witnessed, from lava to crustacean, assailed me liked the caked debris haunting that small plastic soap hammock in the smaller of the bathrooms. Nausea is not a sufficient word.
Werner Herzog
#75. 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
#76. Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch.
Werner Herzog
#77. Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.
Werner Herzog
#78. 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
#79. I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare.
Werner Herzog
#80. Let's put it this way: art house theaters are vanishing. They have almost disappeared completely, and that means there's a shift in what audiences want to see. And they have to be aware of that and be realistic. It's as simple as that.
Werner Herzog
#81. English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it
Werner Herzog
#82. I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.
Werner Herzog
#83. I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony, a defect I have had ever since I was able to think independently.
Werner Herzog
#84. 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
#86. I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.
Werner Herzog
#87. At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey - it looked like a naked child.
Werner Herzog
#88. 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
#89. I have nothing against 3D films but I do not need to see them.
Werner Herzog
#90. The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
Werner Herzog
#91. 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
#92. Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes.
Werner Herzog
#93. I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.
Werner Herzog
#94. Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.
Werner Herzog
#95. 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
#96. I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.
Werner Herzog
#97. 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
#98. I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.
Werner Herzog
#99. In the evening I finished reading a book, and because I was feeling so alone, I buried the book on the edge of the forest with a borrowed spade.
Werner Herzog
#100. 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
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