Werner Herzog quotes

Werner Herzog is a German film director, screenwriter, and actor known for his unique and visionary approach to cinema. His work often explores the extremes of human experience and the relationship between people and nature. He has earned international acclaim for both his documentaries and narrative films. Here are 91 of his quotes:

Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

Werner Herzog

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

Werner Herzog

Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

Werner Herzog

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

Werner Herzog

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

Werner Herzog

Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

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

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

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

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

We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

Werner Herzog

I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with.

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

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

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

Werner Herzog

Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species-including man-crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Werner Herzog

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.

Werner Herzog

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

Werner Herzog

Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."

Werner Herzog

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

Werner Herzog

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.

Werner Herzog

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

Werner Herzog