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Werner Herzog Quotes

Werner Herzog is a German screenwriter, film director, author, actor, and opera director.

Herzog is considered one of the greatest figures of the New German Cinema, along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Schröter, and Wim Wenders. Herzog's films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature.

French filmmaker François Truffaut once called Herzog "the most important film director alive." American film critic Roger Ebert said that Herzog "has never created a single film that is compromised, shameful, made for pragmatic reasons, or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular." He was named one of the 100 most influential people on the planet by Time magazine in 2009.



✵ 5. September 1942
Werner Herzog photo
Werner Herzog: 53 quotes7 likes

Famous Werner Herzog Quotes

“Often he was a joy, and you know, he was one of the few people I ever learned anything from.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002), On Klaus Kinski

“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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

Burden of Dreams (1982)
Context: Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.

“There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.”

Werner Herzog

"The White Diamond" (2004)

“I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

Source: Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

Werner Herzog Quotes about thinking

“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

Herzog on Herzog (2002), On Klaus Kinski

“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 colour photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer.”

Werner Herzog

Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“If you switch on television it's just ridiculous and its destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and — I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against "Bonanza" and "Rawhide", or all these things.”

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

Werner Herzog Quotes about people

“Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."”

Werner Herzog

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“As you see [filmmaking] makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone — just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns.”

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

Werner Herzog: Trending quotes

“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

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“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.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)
Context: 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 Quotes

“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

“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 believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.”

Werner Herzog

"Grizzly Man" (2006)

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

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

“We comprehend… that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. 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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“Incredible. I didn't know how to calm him down, and then I had an inspiration. I went to my hut, where, for months I had hidden a piece of chocolate. We would almost have killed one another for something like that. I went back to him, going right into his face and ate the chocolate. All of a sudden he was quiet. This was utterly beyond him.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002), On Klaus Kinski

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

Werner Herzog

Said while making Fitzcarraldo
Herzog on Herzog (2002)

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

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.”

Werner Herzog

Minnesota declaration (1999)

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

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

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

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.”

Werner Herzog

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“It is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

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

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.”

Werner Herzog

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish.”

Werner Herzog

To Lotte Eisner in Paris after walking from Munich to meet her, Of Walking in Ice ISBN 978-0-9796121-0-7.

“To me, adventure is a concept that applies only to those men and women of earlier historical times, like the mediaeval knights who travelled into the unknown. The concept has degenerated constantly since then… I absolutely loathe adventurers, and I particularly hate this old pseudo-adventurism where the mountain climb becomes about confronting the extremes of humanity.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

Conversation with Paul Holdengräber, in “Was the 20th Century a Mistake?”, The Richard B. Saloman Distinguished Lectures & LIVE from the NYPL, Celeste Bartos Forum, New York (2007) http://www.nypl.org/events/program/2009/05/20/werner-herzog-conversation-paul-holdengräber-was-20th-century-mistake

“That man is a head taller than me. That may change.”

Werner Herzog

"Don Lope de Aguirre" in Aguirre: The Wrath of God [Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes] (1972)

“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“It is my firm belief, and I say this as a dictum, that all these tools now at our disposal, these things part of this explosive evolution of means of communication, mean we are now heading for an era of solitude. 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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

About chickens, on the Signs of Life (1968) DVD audio commentary (2005).

“If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that: I live my life or I end my life with this project.”

Werner Herzog

Said while making Fitzcarraldo
Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

31 May 1981 diary entry (pg. 248 of Herzog's book Conquest of the Useless)

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

Werner Herzog

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.”

Werner Herzog

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“The kinds of landscape I try to find in my films…exist only in our dreams. 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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.”

Werner Herzog

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“You are all wrong.”

Werner Herzog

Responding to booing crowds at the Berlin Film Festival, who disapproved of his Lessons of Darkness (1992)

“Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.”

Werner Herzog

Burden of Dreams (1982)

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