Werner Herzog Quotes

An ocean without monsters would be like sleep without dreams.

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.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot

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

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

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.

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.

Friendship is possible with mice.

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

It's hard to explain the point of dead languages to people today. Latin, in a pinch, but only for lawyers, theologians, and historians. In purely practical terms, these languages are useless. But their study gave us a profounder understanding of the origins of Western culture, of literature, of philosophy, of the deepest currents of our understanding of the world we live in.

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.

said that, in fact, I wasn't a creature of the film industry at all but just someone who at the end of the war had learned how to milk cows. Even all these years later, I start to shake when I think of the odds, but I went on to tell them that in the course of my work with actors and faces I could often sense some of the things that lay beneath. I was, for instance, usually able to recognize people who could milk cows. I turned to McCulley and said: "For instance, you, sir, I am willing to bet you know how to milk a cow." He yelped, banged his thighs, and started miming milking. Yes, indeed, McCulley had grown up on a farm in Tennessee. I don't even want to think about the bottomless embarrassment I would have found myself in had I been wrong.

But his most exciting action was something we witnessed ourselves. At issue were some five tons of contraband coffee, as we were informed much later. At any rate, word had got out, and one night the police were on their way to arrest Siegel Hans. He was able to escape out of a window. All he had on him was his trumpet, and the next morning when it got light, he blew down on his trumpet from the Spitzstein. The police gave chase, but by the time they got to the summit, he was blowing from the cloven top of the Mühlhorn or the peak of the Geigelstein on the other side of the valley. The police, humiliated, called up more and more reinforcements, but Hans continued tooting at them from peak to peak. We heard him. We saw troops of police running through the valley and up the slopes, but neither they nor the officials stationed at the pass got a glimpse of him. He was like a phantom. We children knew why they couldn't catch him. As far as we were concerned, he had run from the Spitzstein all along the border heading into the sunset until he had run right around the whole of Germany to the Geigelstein on its east-facing side. It was the only way he could avoid having to go down into the valley. Twelve days later, he surrendered to the police, but by then, he had a mythic status among his admirers.

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.

I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.