Werner Herzog Quotes

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.

Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.

Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.

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

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

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.

I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.

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.

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

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.

If you’re purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn’t illuminate.

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

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

Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot

I'm quite convinced that cooking is the only alternative to film making. Maybe there's also another alternative, that's walking on foot.

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.

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.

the chicken's still dancing the chicken won't stop

Our repartee would be rich with subtlety and sarcasm, as smart and funny as midcareer Woody Allen. Our fucking, like Werner Herzog, serious and perplexing.

It is only through writing that I become myself

The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...]

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect

at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again

Americans believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people in the world right now.

Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?

the notion of civilisation as a thin layer of ice resting upon a deep ocean of darkness and chaos,

Truth itself wanders through the forests.

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.

Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

In the evening I finished reading a book, and because I was feeling so alone, I buried the book on the edge of the forest with a borrowed spade.

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.

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.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.” William Faulkner

It’s a great metaphor. For what? I don’t know to this day. But I know it’s a great metaphor.

Did you know … Werner Herzog is too self-conscious to eat Wiener Hotdogs?

Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?

Nothing I have witnessed, from lava to crustacean, assailed me liked the caked debris haunting that small plastic soap hammock in the smaller of the bathrooms. Nausea is not a sufficient word.

In ancient Greek the word “chaos” means “gaping void” or “yawning emptiness.” The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.

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.

At the market I ate a piece of a grilled monkey—it looked like a naked child.

One more thing: Philippe, you are not a coward-so what I want to hear from you is the ecstatic truth about the twin towers.

The universe is monstrously indifferent to the presence of man.

Amos Vogel was a mentor, a guiding light for me. In his presence, you always rose. But his importance to me is of minor significance. What is significant is that with him an entire epoch ends. The Last Lion has left us. I am still not capable – or rather unwilling – to understand the fact that Amos passed away, because a man like him cannot be dead. His traces are everywhere. (on the passing of Amos Vogel, his friend for more than 45 years)

there are many better ways of making the argument against hyper-visibility than trolling. As Werner Herzog told GQ, in 2011, speaking about psychoanalysis: “We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore.

Television creates loneliness. This is why sitcoms have added laughter tracks which try to cheat you out of your solitude. Television is a reflection of the world in which we live, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It kills spontaneous imagination and destroys our ability to entertain ourselves, painfully erasing our patience and sensitivity to significant detail.

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.

Today I look at Munich and see a city empty of all significance, invaded by Prussians and stripped of its Bavarian spirit.

I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal misery - and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.

Perseverance is where the gods dwell.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real

I never see the truth as a fixed star on the horizon but always as an activity, a search, an approximation.

Completely aghast, I thought I was in a weird film collaboration between Tinto Brass and Werner Herzog. I

During the Second World War, Goebbels gave an order to all cameramen at the front: “The German soldier always attacks from left to right.” That was it, no further explanation. Sure enough, if you look at old newsreels, the Germans always advance from the left to the right of the screen.

An elderly woman gathering wood, plump and impoverished, tells me about her children one by one, when they were born, when they died. When she becomes aware that I want to go on, she talks three times as fast, shortening destinies, skipping the deaths of three children although adding them later on, unwilling to let even one fate slip away—and this in a dialect that makes it hard for me to follow what she is saying. After the demise of an entire generation of offspring, she would speak no more about herself except to say that she gathers wood, every day; I should have stayed longer.

A perfect morning; in perfect harmony with myself I'm walking briskly uphill.... For once I didn't notice that I was walking, all the way up to the mountaintop forest I was absorbed in deep thought. Perfect clarity and freshness in the air, up further there's some snow. The tangerines make me completely euphoric.

I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens here. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will become uninhabitable . . . I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis – along with quite a few other mistakes – that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

It’s possible to learn to play an instrument as an adult, but the intuitive qualities needed won’t be there; the body needs to be conditioned from an early age. The same could be never said for filmmaking. A musician is made in childhood, but a filmmaker any time.

read a quote recently from Werner Herzog. You know who he is?” “The German film director.” “Right. He said that America was waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that one-third of our people will kill one-third of our people while one-third of our people watches.

A hunter, with a second hunter nearby, asked me what I was looking for up there. I said I liked his dog better than I liked him.

It was only with the beginning of a settled way of life that you got towns, settlements, monocultures, and technology—all the things that are harmful to the prospects for humanity.

Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind.

didn’t love pain; it was just something that was there in my frame of reference—the way I expected the world to be.

Unlike most people, I didn’t have the privilege to choose my profession. I didn’t even ask myself whether I could do it, I just pushed on with things.

Reactions to Even Dwarfs Started Small seem to depend on people’s feelings about their inner dwarf.

Friendship is possible with mice.

What's really bad is that after acknowledging a wrong decision, I don't have the nerve to turn back, since I'd rather correct myself with another wrong decision.

Who said anything about watching films? I tell the Rogues to read, read, read, read, read. Those who read own the world; those who immerse themselves in the Internet or watch too much television lose it. If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker. Our civilisation is suffering profound wounds because of the wholesale abandonment of reading by contemporary society.

Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired visionary, Klaus Kinski to Margaret's Thatcher's Werner Herzog, pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula. The Millennium Dome concept was a remake of 'Fitzcarraldo', a film in which suborned natives (expendable extras) drag a paddle steamer over a hill in order to force a short cut to more exploitable territory. The point being to bring Enrico Caruso, one of the gods of opera, to an upstream trading post. An insane achievement mirrored in the rebranding of the Dome, after its long and expensive limbo, as the O2 Arena, a popular showcase for cryogenic rock acts:Norma Desmond divas and the resurrected Michael Jackson, whose virtual rebirth,post-mortem, gave the shabby tent the status of a riverside cathedral.

Ein jüngerer, intelligent aussehender Mann mit langem Haar fragte mich, ob Filmen, bzw. Gefilmtwerden, Schaden anrichten könne, ob es eine Person vernichten könne. In meinem Herzen war die Antwort ja, aber ich sagte nein.

There is one unvarying constant: everything in the jungle is at pains to strangle everything else in the battle for sunlight. It may be pitch-black at night, but nothing changes the overwhelming, implacable present tense of the jungle.

When it comes to the kind of filmmaking I do, the free market is a harsher but more vibrant structure to function within. It’s where the real battle is fought. If you can leave the respirator and submit yourself to the roughness of the market, you should.

We will be blamed for having not thrown hand grenades into television stations and laying waste to their institutionalised cowardice, for not taking up arms and occupying such debased places which venerate that single, pernicious god: the Einschaltquote, the ratings.

Of course, we are challenging nature itself... and it hits back. It just hits back. That's all. And that's grandiose about it. And we have to- to accept that it is much stronger than we are. Kinski always says it's full of... erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just- Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation... and choking and fighting for survival... and growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they- they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is- is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this... has his share of that curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists... has-has created in anger. It's the only land where- where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us... there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness... and baseness and obscenity... of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like... badly pronounced and half-finished sentences... out of a stupid suburban... novel - a cheap novel. And we have to become humble... in front of this... overwhelming misery and... overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth... and overwhelming lack of order. Even the- the stars up here in the-in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that... there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgement." -Werner Herzog, "Burden of Dreams" (taken from the movie)

Even back in 1968, the first time I was at the Berlin Film Festival with one of my films, I found it ossified and suffocating. I felt the festival should be opened up to everyone and screen work in other cinemas around the city, so I took the initiative, got hold of some prints by young filmmakers and rented a cinema for a few days in Neukölln, a working-class suburb of Berlin, which at the time was populated largely by immigrants and students. The free screenings at this parallel venue were a big success and generated intense discussions between audiences and filmmakers, which were exciting to witness. The whole thing was my rebellious moment against the Establishment, which I saw as being unnecessarily exclusive. I told the festival organisers they needed to have more free screenings and open the festival up to the wider public, which shortly afterwards they did.

Let me speak of Son of Sam. He has been called a mad dog. He is not a mad dog ‐- he is a mad human being, perhaps only a step removed from the rest of us. One has to acknowledge him as a human being and to respect his dignity even in his madness. Otherwise, there is the danger that people may start to kill each other like mad dogs.

No one, not a soul, intimidating stillness. Uncannily, though, in the midst of all this, a fire is blazing, lit, in fact,with petrol. It's flickering, a ghostly fire, wind. On the orange-coloured plain below I can see sheets of rain, and the annunciation of the end of the world is glowing on the horizon, glimmering there. A train races through the land and penetrates the mountain range. Its wheels are glowing. One car erupts in flames. The train stops, men try to extinguish it, but the car can no longer be extinguished. They decide to move on, to hasten, to race. The train moves, it moves into fathomless space, unwavering. In the pitch-blackness of the universe the wheels are glowing, the lone car is glowing, Unimaginable stellar catastrophes take place, entire worlds collapse into a single point. Light can no longer escape, even the profoundest blackness would seem like light and the silence would seem like thunder. The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation.

Over the mountain forest outside of Sachrang, in the last days of the War, an aeroplane dropped a metal device that was visible in the treetops by its flag. We children were certain the flag was wandering from tree to tree, that the mysterious device was moving forward. During the night some men went off and, when they returned at daybreak, they refused to divulge information concerning what they'd found.

Roll up your sleeves and work as a bouncer in a sex club or a warden in a lunatic asylum or a machine operator in a slaughterhouse. Drive a taxi for six months and you’ll have enough money to make a film. Walk on foot, learn languages and a craft or trade that has nothing to do with cinema. Filmmaking — like great literature — must have experience of life at its foundation. Read Conrad or Hemingway and you can tell how much real life is in those books.

Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone book would be The Book of Books. Four million entries, all factually correct, all subject to confirmation. But that doesn’t tell us anything about one of the dozens of James Millers in there. His number and address are indeed correct. But why does he cry into his pillow every night? It takes poetry; it takes the poetic imagination to make visible a deeper layer of truth.

Kinski always says it's full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. It's an unfinished country. It's still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that God, if he exists has - has created in anger. It's the only land where - where creation is unfinished yet. Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real.

Most details are factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was something other than accuracy, some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story.

Camisea 7/2/81 La naturaleza ha recobrado el juicio, solo la selva sigue amenazante, inmóvil. El río, ese monstruo, fluye sin sonido. La noche cae muy rápido y, como siempre a esta hora, los últimos pájaros insultan a la tarde. Canto ronco, sonidos inquietantes y por debajo, uniforme, el chirrido de las primeras cigarras. De tanto trabajar bajo la lluvia tengo los dedos arrugados como las lavanderas. En la espalda tengo al menos cien picaduras de un insecto que se ha mantenido oculto; todo en mí se pudre de humedad. Estaría agradecido si sólo fuese una pesadilla lo que me atormenta. Sobre la mesa apareció un insecto curioso, alargado como una lanza, antediluviano, con antenas a ambos lados de la extremada y fina prolongación delantera. No he podido descubrir si tenía ojos. Cargaba un insecto muerto igual a él y ha desaparecido entre las juntas del suelo de cortezas.

The two men see pornographic pictures. Strangely coiled naked bodies, performing unchaste acts in groups, in hopeless configurations.

I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.

The big social utopias—Communism, Fascism—have led to incredible disasters. Overpopulation of our planet. You just name it. Destruction of what nature is. All of that started in the 20th century... I do believe that the 20th century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

All of us are in some sort of theater that we create for ourselves.

La memoria, en su innata misericordia, no permite que el dolor se conserve en el recuerdo

Bildung

In mir wühlte eine Verlassenheit, wie Termiten in einem gefallenen Baumstamm.

Werner Herzog: “My steps are resolute. And now the Earth shakes. When I walk, a buffalo walks. When I rest, a mountain rests.” This is echoed by Zen master Dōgen, “If you doubt mountains walking you don’t know your own walking.

Finally, my watchers had to fess up. In embarrassed and genuinely polite tones, they said they had no other choice but to arrest me. Then they accompanied me to the prison across the way. As I entered, an extremely tall SS man leapt in front of me and asked: “Do you have any weapons?” “Why?” I responded. “Do I need any?

Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations. And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won’t intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs. You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are goods reasons for this. It’s been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we’d get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We’re already here.

me fascinan las cajetillas de cigarrillos al borde del camino, sobretodo cuando no están estrujadas, entonces se hinchan ligeramente, adquieren cierto aspecto de cadáveres, los cantos ya no están tan definidos y el celofán se empaña desde dentro, es vapor condensado en gotitas de agua por el frío.