Werner Herzog: Trending quotes

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Werner Herzog: 106 quotes7 likes

“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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.”

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

“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 Eats His Shoe (1980)

“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.”

Minnesota declaration (1999)

“You are all wrong.”

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.”

Burden of Dreams (1982)