Top 120 Werner Herzog Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Werner Herzog

102. “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.”

— Werner Herzog

103. “I shouldn’t make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.”

— Werner Herzog

104. “It happens sometimes that the material itself carries things you have not fully planned. The footage has its own right, its own life, its own vibrancy and energy in it.”

— Werner Herzog

105. “Women have a very good sense for seeing instantly what constitutes a good man. Not physically. The physical strength is only a small side of it.”

— Werner Herzog

106. “Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal – be it fax, phone, email, Internet or whatever – human solitude will increase in direct proportion.”

— Werner Herzog

107. “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

108. “I don’t spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.”

— Werner Herzog

109. “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.”

— Werner Herzog

110. “There’s more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.”

— Werner Herzog

111. “You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.”

— Werner Herzog

112. “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

113. “There are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there’s insecurity, collapse of financial systems – that’s where film noir always hits fertile ground.”

— Werner Herzog

114. “Truth itself wanders through the forests.”

— Werner Herzog

115. “I’m a very professional man. I’m not out for the experience of adventure.”

— Werner Herzog

116. “It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

— Werner Herzog

117. “I think a state should not be in the capacity of killing anyone with the exception of warfare.”

— Werner Herzog

118. “You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.”

— Werner Herzog

119. “I work very fast and steadily, and I don’t hardly ever notice that I’m working. It feels like just breathing or walking when I do films.”

— Werner Herzog

120. “I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.”

— Werner Herzog

121. “In the evening I finished reading a book, and because I was feeling so alone, I buried the book on the edge of the forest with a borrowed spade.”

— Werner Herzog

122. “If you don’t have a deal in two days, you won’t have a deal in two years.”

— Werner Herzog

123. “I’m a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done.”

— Werner Herzog

124. “I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience’s imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat.”

— Werner Herzog

125. “I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema: writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.”

— Werner Herzog

126. “My contacts with the film industry can be described in very simple terms: The industry does not really need me, and I do not really need the industry.”

— Werner Herzog

127. “One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.”

— Werner Herzog

128. “A perfect morning; in perfect harmony with myself I’m walking briskly uphill... For once I didn’t notice that I was walking, all the way up to the mountaintop forest I was absorbed in deep thought. Perfect clarity and freshness in the air, up further there’s some snow. The tangerines make me completely euphoric.”

— Werner Herzog

129. “It is only through writing that I become myself.”

— Werner Herzog

130. “I know whenever it comes to be really dysfunctional and vile and base and hostile on screen, I’m good at that.”

— Werner Herzog

131. “I could not become an American citizen. I would not like to become a citizen of a country that has capital punishment.”

— Werner Herzog

132. “In a way, I managed to get the deepest things, the best things out of people. That’s why I’m a filmmaker. If you don’t have it in you, you’d better do something else.”

— Werner Herzog

133. “There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you’ve got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I’m sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn’t have the same substance.”

— Werner Herzog

134. “Americans believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people in the world right now.”

— Werner Herzog

135. “With actors, normally I don’t like to have any conversation about background and about motivations and all this.”

— Werner Herzog

136. “There’s a completely new culture out there. I’m not a participant of texting and driving – or texting at all – but I see there’s something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us.”

— Werner Herzog

137. “I do other sorts of things. I act in other people’s movies. I direct operas. I write books.”

— Werner Herzog

138. “Perseverance is where the gods dwell.”

— Werner Herzog

139. “Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind.”

— Werner Herzog