Werner Herzog Quotes

Friendship is possible with mice.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

We comprehend... that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.

If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that: I live my life or I end my life with this project.

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.

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.

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

It takes the poetic imagination to make visible a deeper layer of truth.

A few years ago, we had a family reunion on the coast of Spain, where my brother was living at the time. At his invitation and expense, we had a wonderful evening at a fish restaurant. My brother, sitting beside me, put his arm around me as I studied the menu. Something began to smoke; I felt a light prick at my back, and suddenly I realized that with his cigarette lighter he had set my shirt on fire. I tore it off, and everyone was aghast, but the pair of us laughed loudly at the joke that didn't seem funny to anyone else. Someone lent me a T-shirt for the rest of the evening, and the little sore patch of skin on my back was cooled with a splash of prosecco.

I have experienced comparable transformations in the realm of communications, beginning with ancient times. I remember the man working for the mayor's office in Wüstenrot in Swabia, a few hours from Munich and Sachrang, where my brother and I later lived for a year with our father. He was the town crier. There's an archaic German word for it. I heard him make his way through the village up to the Raitelberg, ringing his bell to get people's attention. Every three or four houses, he would stop and call out his "Hear ye, hear ye!" and announce official decrees and deadlines. From my early childhood, I knew what radio and newspapers were even though we didn't always have electricity, but I never saw a film. I had no notion of cinema. I didn't know such a thing existed until one day a man with a mobile projector came to us in our one-room village school in Sachrang and showed us

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.