Werner Herzog Quotes

44 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Werner Herzog
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
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