quotes by Werner Herzog

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

"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."
— Werner Herzog

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

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

"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."
— Werner Herzog

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

"Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle"
— Werner Herzog

"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."
— Werner Herzog

"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."
— Werner Herzog

""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?" "
— Werner Herzog (Of Walking in Ice)

"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."
— Werner Herzog

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

"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'"
— Werner Herzog