Werner Herzog Quotes & Sayings

It is only through writing that I become myself — 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

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

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

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 want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it! — Werner Herzog

I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. — 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 into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together. — 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

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

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

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

I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals. — Werner Herzog

You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. — Werner Herzog

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

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

We do not see the danger clearly enough that we develop images adequate to our state of civilization. When you watch TV, you know instantly that there's something wrong with the images. When you open a magazine and see the ads, you know there's something wrong with the images. And it's unhealthy and not good and outright dangerous, in my opinion. — Werner Herzog

You have to realize that, about 20,000 years ago, there was a cataclysmic event when an entire rock face collapsed and sealed off the cave. It's a completely preserved time capsule. You've got tracks of cave bears that look like they were left yesterday, and you've got the footprint of a boy who was probably eight years old next to the footprint of a wolf. — Werner Herzog

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. — 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

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

You are in a place that has not been seen for tens of thousands of years, because it was so sealed off. There is such silence that when you hold your breath you can hear your own heartbeat. Everything is so fresh that you have the sensation that the painters have merely retreated deeper into the dark and that they are looking at you. — Werner Herzog

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

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

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

The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man. — Werner Herzog

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

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

There is never an excuse not to finish a film. — 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

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 a product of my failures, — Werner Herzog

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

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

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

When I say tourism is sin and traveling on foot is virtue, it's condensed into a dictum. It's much more complex than that, but let's face it, for me, my experience, the world reveals itself to those that travel on foot. You understand the world in a much deeper level. And it does good to anyone who makes film. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very often, footage that you have shot develops its own dynamic, it's own life, that is totally unexpected, and moves away from you're original intentions. And you have to acknowledge, yes, there is a child growing and developing and moving in a direction that isn't expected-accept it as it is and let it develop its own life. — Werner Herzog

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

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

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

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

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

Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs. — Werner Herzog

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

You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of raindeer and it was left unfinished and somebody else finished it. But through radio carbon dating we know that the next one completed the painting 5,000 years later. You're just blown away by the notion of passage of time. We have no relationship to that kind of depth of time. — Werner Herzog

Get used to the bear behind you. — 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

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

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

For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do
out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation
look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue. — Werner Herzog

I love nature, but against my better judgment. — Werner Herzog

The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted. It is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lock picking or forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream. — 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 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 travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush. — 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

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

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

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about ... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field. — 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've never left my culture. I've left my country, but I've not left my culture. In the same way, you shouldn't be worried why George Lucas is going to the outer galaxy to make a movie. He's still making a film within his culture; he's making an American film. I go to Thailand or the Peruvian jungle, the Amazon, and I still make Bavarian films. — Werner Herzog

I don't see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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