Werner Herzog Quotes

As you see [filmmaking] makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone — just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns.

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

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.

I'm completely aware and utterly aware that Russia [the Soviet Union] lost 25 million people for winning the war, and I know that Russian troops were the ones who liberated concentration camps, Auschwitz and others, and I'm aware that there's an incredible sacrifice on the side of Russia, and I do believe that it's ignored because of course of political interests. It's very much the question what are the facts, maybe 600 or so thousand American soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War, 25–26 million Russian. Those are facts that cannot be ignored, and today it's not that really important what really happened, it's more the question who owns the narrative, and occupying the narrative has created some sort of lopsided ideologies in lopsided information, that we see every day.

There are dignified stupidities, and there are heroic stupidities, and there is such a thing as stupid stupidities, and that would be a stupid stupidity not to have a camera on board.

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

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] … an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land.

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

Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal.