Werner Herzog Quotes - Page 2

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.

Get used to the bear behind you.

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

Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.

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

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.

The universe couldn't care less about us. I say this very clearly in the film [ "Into the Inferno"]: our planet is "indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles and vapid humans alike."

While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.

I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.

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

I never planned my career in steps. It's all coming at me like burglars in the night.

I see planets that don't exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed.

Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.

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

I have always postulated that we have to find a new way to deal with reality. It's not so much facts that interest me, but a deeper truth in them - an ecstasy of truth, an ecstatic truth that illuminates us. That's what I've been after.

We have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Facts do not constitute truth.