Werner Herzog Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Werner Herzog's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Film director Werner Herzog's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 296 quotes on this page collected since September 5, 1942! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
  • Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

    Paolo Jedlowski, Roberto De Gaetano, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, Slavoj Žižek (2016). “CINEMA, THOUGHT, LIFE. Conversations with Fata Morgana”, p.128, Luigi Pellegrini Editore
  • 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.

    Source: www.spiegel.de
  • 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.

    "Was the 20th Century a Mistake?". Interview with Paul Holdengräber, www.nypl.org. February 16, 2007.
  • Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set.

    "12 Things I Learned at Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School" by Marie-Françoise Theodore, www.indiewire.com. September 24, 2014.
  • Of course there's a value in a storyboard if you do a big - let's say an action movie and actors have to move and act in front of a green screen because entire backgrounds exploding and cars flying through there have to be created separately, and in this case you better make sure the actors are precisely placed and the background action is moving in a certain moment, for this type of film you would need a storyboard.

    Source: collider.com
  • 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.

    "Burden of Dreams". Documentary, www.imdb.com. 1982.
  • We were very, very lucky [with Tim White filmed making historic discoveries in the East African Rift ] . In 100 years, only three skeletal remains [of early man] were ever found at this site. This was the third one, and we were right there when it happened. In fact, when I first heard they had found something, I said, "Please stop it! Don't do anything right now. Let's do it tomorrow until we have unpacked our cameras and assembled our stuff.

    Source: www.rogerebert.com
  • I try to be after something that is deeply reverberating inside of our souls, some deep echo from - even from prehistory. What makes us humans? How do we communicate? Where are we going at this moment? Something for an audience where they can step outside of themselves, where they can be almost like in ecstasy of truth, some sort of deep illumination. And that's what I'm trying in documentaries and in feature films.

    Source: www.pbs.org
  • It doesn't matter whether you shoot on celluloid or on digital, you better make a good film.

    Source: collider.com
  • It's not because nature is angry, it's rather that we are stupid. We're not doing the right thing with our planet.

    Source: www.rogerebert.com
  • Here, all of a sudden, we have a revolution in - in communication, and it is - it is really, truly big. Internet is as big as the introduction of fire to the human race, or the introduction of electricity into our lives.

    Source: www.pbs.org
  • 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.

    "12 Things I Learned at Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School" by Marie-Françoise Theodore, www.indiewire.com. September 24, 2014.
  • I am too much into what I'm doing in my work.

    Source: www.salon.com
  • It's very enigmatic because of course, the population [of North Korea] has no contact with the world outside or it's very, very limited. They don't have any telephone connections, no radio, no TV, no movies, no newspapers - nothing from the outside world. This is very strange and there's the very strict, unifying government that forces you to be in step. You see it in the stadium where the spectators create, by flipping cards, an image of the dear leader, or of the volcano, and it's made of a 100,000 human pictures.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.

  • 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.

  • I wouldn't like to travel at all. I've been too much around.

    Source: www.salon.com
  • 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.

  • For me, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is not so clear - my "documentaries" were largely scripted, rehearsed, and repeated, and have a lot of fantasy and concoction in them.

    Source: www.avclub.com
  • 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.

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

  • When you look at any of my films you will immediately be able to tell this is a [Werner] Herzog film. Even if you didn't have any credits, in two minutes flat you would know.

    Source: collider.com
  • 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's Abyss Stares Back". Interview with Leah Carroll, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 10, 2011.
  • 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.

    "Cave of Forgotten Dreams (3D) - Werner Herzog interview". Interview with Rob Carnevale, www.indielondon.co.uk.
  • 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.

    "'The Birth of the Modern Human Soul'". Interview with David Gordon Smith, www.spiegel.de. February 16, 2011.
  • The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendor.

    "Herzog: Ecstatic Truths - A Werner Herzog Documentary Retrospective". mubi.com. March 31, 2016.
  • At the same time, there's something magnificent about volcanoes; they created the atmosphere that we need for breathing.

    Source: www.interviewmagazine.com
  • Orson Welles, one of the best of the best. One of the strongest. As strong as an animal. He somehow was pushed out of the business because he would spend the entire budget of the film before he had even done half the pre-production.

    Source: collider.com
  • 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's Abyss Stares Back". Interview with Leah Carroll, www.interviewmagazine.com. November 10, 2011.
  • There's happens to be a volcano in the vicinity and there's some talk about a volcano as well, so that's the title Salt and Fire

    Source: collider.com
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  • We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 296 quotes from the Film director Werner Herzog, starting from September 5, 1942! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!