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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment. -- Werner Herzog
The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination. -- Werner Herzog
The trees are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain. ... Taking a close look at what's around us, there is some sort of harmony: it's the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
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
Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema. -- Werner Herzog
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
I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks. -- Werner Herzog
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. -- Werner Herzog
THE ACT OF KILLING invents a new form of cinematic surrealism. -- Werner Herzog
I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition. -- Werner Herzog
You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him. -- Werner Herzog
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
The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man. -- Werner Herzog
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
I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard. -- Werner Herzog
I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum. -- Werner Herzog
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
Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. -- Werner Herzog
Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice. -- Werner Herzog
I'm not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together. -- Werner Herzog
Tourism is a mortal sin. -- Werner Herzog
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
It is only through writing that I become myself -- Werner Herzog
We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. -- Werner Herzog
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
Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
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
I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be Werner Herzog. -- Werner Herzog
What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush. -- Werner Herzog
I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth. -- Werner Herzog
Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set, -- Werner Herzog
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
I am a product of my failures, -- Werner Herzog
If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it! -- Werner Herzog
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
I think there should be holy war against yoga classes. -- Werner Herzog
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
I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews. -- Werner Herzog
English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it -- Werner Herzog
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
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
I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that! -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
Truth itself wanders through the forests. -- Werner Herzog
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
The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendor. -- Werner Herzog
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
I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century. -- Werner Herzog
In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it. -- Werner Herzog
I have nothing against 3D films but I do not need to see them. -- Werner Herzog
You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. -- Werner Herzog
I have a great map of the Tibesti Mountains in the southern Sahara or Northern Chad. It's a dream of mine to go there, but it's such a volatile area, you have to be prudent. -- Werner Herzog
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
I'm not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming - I've always been a man of the theaters. -- Werner Herzog
Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness. -- Werner Herzog
Facts do not constitute truth, -- Werner Herzog
There is never an excuse not to finish a film. -- Werner Herzog
I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting. -- Werner Herzog
May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it. -- Werner Herzog
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
I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. -- Werner Herzog
I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder. -- Werner Herzog
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
I'm the last one who would do self-analysis. -- Werner Herzog
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
Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence. -- Werner Herzog
One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies. -- Werner Herzog
I'm politically interested, but I have no particular talent as a political beast, stepping out and running for office. -- Werner Herzog
The universe is not harmonious: you know that by looking outside. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary. -- Werner Herzog
I see planets that don't exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed. -- Werner Herzog
With actors, normally I don't like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this. -- Werner Herzog
I'm simply not afraid. It's not in my dictionary of behaviour. -- Werner Herzog
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
Get used to the bear behind you. -- Werner Herzog
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. -- Werner Herzog
I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare. -- Werner Herzog
Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. -- Werner Herzog
You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school. -- Werner Herzog
We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile. -- Werner Herzog
Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life. -- Werner Herzog
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. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
If you want to propose marriage to your girlfriend and you live in England and she is in Sicily, do the decent thing and walk down there. Travelling by car or aeroplane wouldn't be right at such a moment. -- Werner Herzog
I'm not an interviewer. I have conversations. -- Werner Herzog
I never planned my career in steps. It's all coming at me like burglars in the night. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books. -- Werner Herzog
I'm not very eager to sit and look at my films all the time. -- Werner Herzog
I do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to. It's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
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
I know for sure that there is only one step from insecticide to genocide. -- Werner Herzog
Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief. -- Werner Herzog
Money doesn't make films. You just do it and take the initiative. -- Werner Herzog
I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure. -- Werner Herzog
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
I love nature, but against my better judgment. -- Werner Herzog
At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey - it looked like a naked child. -- Werner Herzog
Why go to Antarctica, why do a film like 'Grizzly Man'? It's the sheer joy of storytelling - it's the urge. -- Werner Herzog
If you don't have a deal in two days, you won't have a deal in two years -- Werner Herzog
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
I'm a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done. -- Werner Herzog
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
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
I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals. -- Werner Herzog