Werner Herzog quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Werner Herzog on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

I'm not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming - I've always been a man of the theaters.

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.

You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.

We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.

I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.

There is never an excuse not to finish a film.

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.

With actors, normally I don't like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this.

I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.

I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.

One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.

I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.

We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

It is only through writing that I become myself

I have nothing against 3D films but I do not need to see them.

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.

I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure.

Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read ... if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.

I love nature, but against my better judgment.

I'm quite convinced that cooking is the only alternative to film making. Maybe there's also another alternative, that's walking on foot.

I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

If you don't have a deal in two days, you won't have a deal in two years

I know for sure that there is only one step from insecticide to genocide.

I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

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.

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.

English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it

I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.

If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.

I'm politically interested, but I have no particular talent as a political beast, stepping out and running for office.

I'm simply not afraid. It's not in my dictionary of behaviour.

The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendor.

I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.

I'm a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done.

If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it.

Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.

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.

I never planned my career in steps. It's all coming at me like burglars in the night.

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.

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.

I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.

I am a product of my failures,

I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare.

The universe is not harmonious: you know that by looking outside.

Get used to the bear behind you.

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.

May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.

I'm the last one who would do self-analysis.

You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.

THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism.

The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.

I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.

I see planets that don't exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed.

Truth itself wanders through the forests.

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.

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.

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.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.

I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books.

Money doesn't make films. You just do it and take the initiative.

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.

Facts do not constitute truth,

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet.

If your project has real substance, ultimately the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs.

I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that!

The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.

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.

I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals.

I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

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.

Why go to Antarctica, why do a film like 'Grizzly Man'? It's the sheer joy of storytelling - it's the urge.

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

Tourism is a mortal sin.

I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be Werner Herzog.

Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.

If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!

Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set,

I'm not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together.

Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey - it looked like a naked child.

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.

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.

Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.

Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.

Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

I'm not an interviewer. I have conversations.

I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.

Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

I'm not very eager to sit and look at my films all the time.