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Werner Herzog
50 quotes
“You are all wrong.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) first seen 1992 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Responding to booing crowds at the Berlin Film Festival, who disapproved of his Lessons of Darkness (1992)
“You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) first seen 1977 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Promoting the English-language release of Heart of Glass in the New York Times, 11 September 1977
“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 (born 1942) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: About chickens, on the Signs of Life (1968) DVD audio commentary (2005).
“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 (born 1942) first seen 1981 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 31 May 1981 diary entry (pg. 248 of Herzog's book Conquest of the Useless)
“I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Grizzly Man" (2006)
“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 (born 1942) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversation with Paul Holdengräber, in “Was the 20th Century a Mistake?”, The Richard B. Saloman Distinguished Lectures & LIVE from the NYPL, Celeste Bartos Forum, New York (2007)
“Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The White Diamond" (2004)
“If you switch on television it's just ridiculous and its destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and — I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against "Bonanza" and "Rawhide", or all these things.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As you see [filmmaking] makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone — just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course we are challenging nature itself and it hits back. It just hits back. That's all, and that's "grandiose" about it, and we have to accept that it's much stronger than we are.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Kinski always says [the jungle is] full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just— and nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape, and whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse, so we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger. It's the only land where creation is unfinished yet.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that: I live my life or I end my life with this project.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The kinds of landscape I try to find in my films...exist only in our dreams. 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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We comprehend... that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. 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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. 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 (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To me, adventure is a concept that applies only to those men and women of earlier historical times, like the mediaeval knights who travelled into the unknown. The concept has degenerated constantly since then... I absolutely loathe adventurers, and I particularly hate this old pseudo-adventurism where the mountain climb becomes about confronting the extremes of humanity.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 colour photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Incredible. I didn't know how to calm him down, and then I had an inspiration. I went to my hut, where, for months I had hidden a piece of chocolate. We would almost have killed one another for something like that. I went back to him, going right into his face and ate the chocolate. All of a sudden he was quiet. This was utterly beyond him.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Often he was a joy, and you know, he was one of the few people I ever learned anything from.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm completely aware and utterly aware that Russia [the Soviet Union] lost 25 million people for winning the war, and I know that Russian troops were the ones who liberated concentration camps, Auschwitz and others, and I'm aware that there's an incredible sacrifice on the side of Russia, and I do believe that it's ignored because of course of political interests. It's very much the question what are the facts, maybe 600 or so thousand American soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War, 25–26 million Russian. Those are facts that cannot be ignored, and today it's not that really important what really happened, it's more the question who owns the narrative, and occupying the narrative has created some sort of lopsided ideologies in lopsided information, that we see every day.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview (2020)
“Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle — we in comparison to that enormous articulation — we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle, it is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Actually, for some time now I have given some thought to opening a film school. But if I did start one up you would only be allowed to fill out an application form after you have walked alone on foot, let's say from Madrid to Kiev, a distance of about five thousand kilometres. While walking, write. Write about your experiences and give me your notebooks. I would be able to tell who had really walked the distance and who had not. While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking and what it truly involves than you ever would sitting in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.”
Werner Herzog (born 1942) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source