Werner Herzog Quotes

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?

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Today I often said 'forest' to myself.
Truth itself wanders through the forests.

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