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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.
Werner Herzog
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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.
Werner Herzog
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!
Werner Herzog
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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
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Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.
Werner Herzog
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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
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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
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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
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I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.
Werner Herzog
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We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
Werner Herzog
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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
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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
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Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Georges Bataille
Werner Herzog
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Born:
September 5, 1942
(age 81)
Bio:
Werner Herzog Stipetić, known as Werner Herzog, is a German film director, producer, screenwriter, author, actor and opera director.
Known for:
Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Grizzly Man (2005)
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)
Most used words:
film
cinema
danger
live
truth
man
stupidity
real
landscapes
people
life
war
love
mind
talk
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