Errol Morris Quotes

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

I've never had any problem with crazy people. I like crazy people; I probably am a crazy person myself.

The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.

Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second.

People lie, and they always are very very creative in finding new ways to lie.

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.

I think an interview, properly considered, should be an investigation. You shouldn't know what the interview will yield. Otherwise, why do it at all?

I've been horribly depressed (lately), which, as you know, can be terribly time-consuming. I mean, if you're going to do it right, that is.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence.

You know, I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them.

Mike Wallace's interviews may make great television, but they don't produce great evidence.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble.

The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.

I taught my son to read with tabloids. We would sit to read the 'Weekly World News' together.

If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing.

Language can be used to so many diverse ends. It can be used to clarify and, of course, it can be used to obfuscate, confuse, evade ...

My advice to all interviewers is: Shut up and listen. It's harder than it sounds.

I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.

I don't think that anybody really makes films quite like mine. That's maybe true of any filmmaker.

I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.

You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?

There are many dramas that I would like to make: dramas based on real stories. It's approaching things from the other side.

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.

There is only one direction. (Down.) There is only one color. (Black.) And there is only one number (Zero.)

I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn't controlled anymore.

I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular.

I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning.

There is such a thing as truth, but we have a vested interest in not seeing it, in avoiding it.

Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.

Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest.

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.

Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.

First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories.

You can't tell by looking at a film-clip whether it is a drama or a documentary without knowing how it was produced.

Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.

There's this crazy thinking that style guarantees truth. You go out with a hand-held camera, use available light, and somehow the truth emerges.

Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.

One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say.

I like to think that I'm nonjudgmental, that I can listen and be engaged by almost anything.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing.

A lot of stories that have fascinated me are tabloid stories that have come from other newspapers, like 'The New York Times.'

Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious.

Set up an arbitrary set of rules and then follow them slavishly.

There are endless anxieties in putting a film together, and it's an enormous relief when you know it's working with an audience.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.

A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

When you're working for yourself and your own obsession with finding the truth, you're at your own mercy.

The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.

Do I like tawdry, sleazy stories? Yeah, I do.

The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.