Werner Herzog Quotations

I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.

I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.

I'm simply not afraid. It's not in my dictionary of behaviour.

Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.

Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it's not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it's not your fault.

If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn't matter whether you're bold or cowardly, or whether you're stupid or intelligent. Doesn't get you anywhere.

I despise formal restaurants. I find all of that formality to be very base and vile. I would much rather eat potato chips on the sidewalk.

I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.

I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.

The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.

I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.

I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.

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.

I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.

Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There's no doubt in my heart.

I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.

I'm not into digital marketing, downloading, or streaming - I've always been a man of the theaters.

Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It's an ego trip, and I'm not on an ego trip. I don't have ambitions - I have a vision.

Why go to Antarctica, why do a film like 'Grizzly Man'? It's the sheer joy of storytelling - it's the urge.

I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be Werner Herzog.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are.

Film should be looked at straight on; it is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.

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.

Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes.

I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I'm good at that.

If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him,

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

I'm politically interested, but I have no particular talent as a political beast, stepping out and running for office.

The universe is not harmonious: you know that by looking outside.

I have a great map of the Tibesti Mountains in the southern Sahara or Northern Chad. It's a dream of mine to go there, but it's such a volatile area, you have to be prudent.

I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.

There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance.

I have nothing against 3D films but I do not need to see them.

I live my life outside of the glitz and glamour of the red carpet events, and so you'll never see me there. I'm never at parties.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

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

I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books.

I work very fast and steadily, and I don't hardly ever notice that I'm working. It feels like just breathing or walking when I do films.

Let's put it this way: art house theaters are vanishing. They have almost disappeared completely, and that means there's a shift in what audiences want to see. And they have to be aware of that and be realistic. It's as simple as that.

I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure.

I'm not very eager to sit and look at my films all the time.

I'm the last one who would do self-analysis.

Many of my films have not been easy work,

Only 30 minutes from where I live, there is a completely hidden and forgotten archive. Nobody even knows that this exists here.

I have my doubts about his attitude toward wild nature and that he did anything to help the bears, ... Wild nature is simply wild, and we have to respect that. He keeps repeating to the bears 'I love you,' and I think that is wrong. You should respect the distance.

I have never left my culture. It doesn't matter whether I film with Australian aborigines or in Antarctica.

I can tell those apart who can milk a cow, I mean with their bare hands. Sometimes people can tell by looking at someone, 'Aha, this must be a drug dealer or this must a lawyer.

It fills me with joy to see Dieter (Dengler) again.

We had some ranting about the meaning of nature, ... And Jewel is more defending Treadwell's position, that there is harmony in the universe and the only disturbing element is human beings. I don't see it that way.

Yes, the pyramids have been built, but if you give me 300,000 disciplined men and give me 30 years, I could build a bigger one.

We are still doing somersaults for it. It's the usual pandemonium that makes moviemaking an odd profession, and I am the lion tamer.

Of course this is me revisiting my own past, going into the wilderness, telling a story, perhaps not the one I set out to tell, ... I had no opinion about Treadwell . . . I gave him space, let him tell me his story. And it was pretty easy to see that he was haunted by demons -- illuminated, courageous and cowardly, exhilarated and in love with the idea of himself as a star.

Strangely enough, I've always believed that my stories were mainstream stories; the films are narrated in a way that you never have a boring moment.

It's not that I do not care about it. I've seen it very often in my career. For example, 'Aguirre: The Wrath of God' was refused by the Cannes Film Festival and in the German press it was so badly reviewed that you had the feeling it was the worst film of the decade and it endured the test of time. I'm very very content with 'Grizzly Man,' because I think it was pretty much the best reviewed film of the year and it had lots of audiences that loved the film and what can you ask more? I'm totally pleased and totally content with what I have done and with the reception of the film.

ecstatic truth. I've always tried to strive for a much deeper truth in the images, in cinema, in storytelling, on a screen, so whether I've achieved it or not remains to be seen. . . . There are short fleeting moments when I know that I have achieved it. And to work for that and to strive for it and to try, gives at least some dignity and some meaning to my existence.

I'm making films for an audience out there and a very tiny fraction of them are would-be filmmakers. But let's speak of them-the would-be filmmakers, the tiny fraction. I've witnessed many times when I've showed films and was present at a screening that exactly those people feel very much encouraged by what I'm doing.

I'm old-fashioned; I'm a man of celluloid. I think it still has a depth and a precision that you do not have in the digital domain, and the digital domain has some disadvantages. When you shoot something and record it with a digital camera, you have an instant access to it - you don't have to wait for the dailies.

I love my movies as they are. I let them develop their own lives.

I just hope it's a small one. I only travel light. It's got to fit in my hand-held luggage.

With actors, normally I don't like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this.

I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men.

My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close... It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them.

This is the birth of the modern human soul. The artists are like us, not like the Neanderthals, who had no culture - and who incidentally were still roaming the landscape at the time the paintings were made. It is striking that there is a distant cultural echo that seems to reach all the way down to us, over dozens of millennia.

The danger is to stupidly believe that depicting facts gives us much insight. If facts were the only thing that counted, the telephone directory would be the book of books.

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.

In Germany, you would be hanged if you cracked a joke about Hitler and you would be killed by the state if you were insane in a project of euthanasia.

Women have a very good sense for seeing instantly what constitutes a good man. Not physically. The physical strength is only a small side of it.

I function better in the jungle in Amazonia or Antarctica or Alaska or the Sahara desert. An artificial environment like a studio has never attracted me. I could work in a studio, but I would never really feel at home.

In my films, I hope there are a few moments where you feel almost illuminated, like in a state of ecstasy, stepping out of yourself, beyond yourself and perceiving something which is only, in the case of cinema, possible in collective dreams.

I don't care whether the person is guilty or not guilty. It's not my business to establish guilt or innocence. It's a court of law that does that and a jury does that, but not me.

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs.

For me, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is not so clear - my "documentaries" were largely scripted, rehearsed, and repeated, and have a lot of fantasy and concoction in them.

We do not see the danger clearly enough that we develop images adequate to our state of civilization. When you watch TV, you know instantly that there's something wrong with the images. When you open a magazine and see the ads, you know there's something wrong with the images. And it's unhealthy and not good and outright dangerous, in my opinion.

I'm a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done.

Some of the most important caves, like Lascaux in the Dordogne region in France, have had to be closed down. There had been too many people allowed in, and they left a mold on the walls that is spreading and which can't really be stopped.

You have to realize that, about 20,000 years ago, there was a cataclysmic event when an entire rock face collapsed and sealed off the cave. It's a completely preserved time capsule. You've got tracks of cave bears that look like they were left yesterday, and you've got the footprint of a boy who was probably eight years old next to the footprint of a wolf.

You are in a place that has not been seen for tens of thousands of years, because it was so sealed off. There is such silence that when you hold your breath you can hear your own heartbeat. Everything is so fresh that you have the sensation that the painters have merely retreated deeper into the dark and that they are looking at you.

The paintings are not just on flat walls - you have these enormous niches, bulges and protrusions, as well as stalactites and stalagmites. The effect of the three-dimensionality is phenomenal. It's a real drama which the artists of the time understood, and they used it for the drama of their paintings.

There are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare.

The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.

It happens sometimes that the material itself carries things you have not fully planned. The footage has its own right, its own life, its own vibrancy and energy in it.

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.

I do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to. It's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly.

My contacts with the film industry can be described in very simple terms: The industry does not really need me, and I do not really need the industry.

When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.

I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.

I've never left my culture. I've left my country, but I've not left my culture. In the same way, you shouldn't be worried why George Lucas is going to the outer galaxy to make a movie. He's still making a film within his culture; he's making an American film. I go to Thailand or the Peruvian jungle, the Amazon, and I still make Bavarian films.

I'm one of the few reading and thinking people who loves Las Vegas for the vulgarity and omnipresence of the dream. The collective dream. There's something enormous about it. Let me say one thing: Las Vegas and cinema have similar roots. The country fair. The magician at the country fair. The vulgarity of the country fair.

I'm not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together.

In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange.

It was a subject [ volcanoes] that was dormant in me for a long time and it popped up 40 years ago when I made a [short] film on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe about a volcano that was about to explode and a single farmer refused to leave ["La Soufrière"].

The daredevil aspect to what I did there is moving a monstrously big ship over a mountain in the jungle of Peru with 800 or 900 or so native people from the area. So that idea was wild but the way it was executed was prudent. Nobody was ever hurt and when it became clear that we had to be more secure with the posts that would hold the ship, I spent 12 days having a post built that would have withstood the force of 10 times the weight of my ship.

I have made 70 or so films. In all my films not a single actor, a single extra, was hurt. Not one. So statistics are on my side when I say I'm clinically sane.