Werner Herzog Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

Werner Herzog
That man is a head taller than me. That may change.

Werner Herzog
You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.

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

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

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

Werner Herzog
Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

Werner Herzog
I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.

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

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

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
You should look straight at a film; that's the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

Werner Herzog
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
For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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