Top 50 Wim Wenders Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Before you say cut, wait 5 seconds.”

— Wim Wenders

2. “Without dreams, there can be no courage. And without courage, there can be no action.”

— Wim Wenders

3. “The more opinions you have, the less you see.”

— Wim Wenders

4. “I think sometimes you have to just imagine something that looks pretty impossible. By imagining something that is impossible, automatically you wish you could make it possible.”

— Wim Wenders

5. “Cinema is a worldwide phenomenon.”

— Wim Wenders

6. “On the contrary a film can promote the idea of change without any political message whatsoever but in its form and language can tell people that they can change their lives and contribute to progressive changes in the world.”

— Wim Wenders

7. “Filmmakers tell actors to adjust their body language, and the famous presence of the actor is his or her body language. That is what makes them special and a movie star. An actor’s capital is his body.”

— Wim Wenders

8. “Final cut is overrated. Only fools keep insisting on always having the final word. The wise swallow their pride in order to get to the best possible cut.”

— Wim Wenders

9. “It’s a great lesson in modesty that you realize you’re illiterate in a field that you think you’re an expert in.”

— Wim Wenders

10. “Don’t worry about getting final cut, worry about making the best possible cut.”

— Wim Wenders

11. “The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.”

— Wim Wenders

12. “The last adventure left on this planet is creativity because we’ve been everywhere. There’s not much left to explore. But there’s a lot of exploration left in the human imagination.”

— Wim Wenders

13. “Photographs put time into such a perspective. They humble us and our selfish memories.”

— Wim Wenders

14. “Loving photography and wanting to be a painter, it all ended up in the process of filmmaking. It’s strange professionally be to connected because it connects you to architecture, it connects you to painting, it connects you to writers, to actors. It connects you to really all of the arts.”

— Wim Wenders

15. “Any film that supports the idea that things can be changed is a great film in my eyes.”

— Wim Wenders

16. “It’s almost scary how stylish things can look if you take the color out – how much more you see the essence of things and how much more something can appear elegant.”

— Wim Wenders

17. “I think seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely.”

— Wim Wenders

18. “In fact, it is amazing how much European films – Italian, French, German and English – have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.”

— Wim Wenders

19. “So I am getting a little bored with defining one type of film as American and the other European or from somewhere else because the division is no longer true.”

— Wim Wenders

20. “Many of the critics today get airline tickets, hotel accommodation, bags, beautiful photographs, gifts and other expenses paid by the distributors, and then are supposed to write serious articles about the movie.”

— Wim Wenders

21. “Movies are something people see all over the world because there is a certain need for it.”

— Wim Wenders

22. “Filmmaking is really connected to life and all of the expressions that different arts found to allow access to life. Filmmaking touches on all of it.”

— Wim Wenders

23. “The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.”

— Wim Wenders

24. “What is generally referred to as American-style films are, in fact, studio productions.”

— Wim Wenders

25. “But I think that the spirit of protectionism would be the grave of European cinema. You cannot protect something by building a fence around it and thinking that this will help it survive.”

— Wim Wenders

26. “Of course the French are making very credible movies and it is still one of the greatest nations in terms of world cinema but the real problem is the decay in film criticism.”

— Wim Wenders

27. “Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.”

— Wim Wenders

28. “Maybe it’s the music that enables them to function like that, to always take everything as it comes and never complain about the misery, hardship or injustice.”

— Wim Wenders

29. “Pina Bausch’s motto was “Dance, otherwise we are lost.” She really meant it, that dance was her answer to life and to the troubles and to the problems that can arise. That was her way to deal with everything, to dance.”

— Wim Wenders

30. “Film is a very, very powerful medium. It can either confirm the idea that things are wonderful the way they are, or it can reinforce the conception that things can be changed.”

— Wim Wenders

31. “Whoever came up first with that saying a picture is worth a thousand words didn’t understand the first thing about either one.”

— Wim Wenders

32. “Everything is entertainment; criticism is now entertainment and it seems that the French directors have woken up one day and suddenly realised that they were not backed up any more.”

— Wim Wenders

33. “The Cuban people have an amazingly strong and unbroken spirit.”

— Wim Wenders

34. “If you travel a lot, if you like roaming about in order to lose yourself, you can end up in the strangest places. I think it must be a kind of built-in radar, which often takes me to places that are either peculiarly quiet or peculiar in a quiet sort of way.”

— Wim Wenders

35. “Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings.”

— Wim Wenders

36. “In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world – in America first but also in Europe – has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance.”

— Wim Wenders

37. “I remember that even my first impression of Italian cinema was pictures by paparazzi because my mom was reading all of these trash magazines with paparazzo pictures.”

— Wim Wenders

38. “If anything, I see myself as a witness. I’d also be pleased, if you’d call me an interpreter. I try to hear and see the message of a place and pass it on, into that other language, the universal one of images.”

— Wim Wenders

39. “The beautiful image today means nothing. It’s worthshit. In fact, it’s almost as if it has the opposite effect, becauseyou’re just like everything else out there.”

— Wim Wenders

40. “An image that is unseen can’t sell anything. It is pure, therefore true, beautiful, in one word: innocent. As long as no eye contaminates it, it is in perfect unison with the world. If it is not seen, the image and the object it represents belong together.”

— Wim Wenders

41. “For us music is mainly part of the entertainment world and is often a luxury.”

— Wim Wenders

42. “I’m getting a little bored by the juxtaposition of American and other cinema. I no longer think this division is as true as it might have been in the 1980s, or the early part of the 90s.”

— Wim Wenders

43. “The world of fashion. I’m interested in the world, not in fashion! But, maybe I was too quick to put down fashion. Why not look at it without prejudice? Why not examine it like any other industry, like the movies for example?”

— Wim Wenders

44. “Ibrahim tells his story without a grain of complaint, and this was true for all of the band members. This is very much part of the Cuban spirit and soul.”

— Wim Wenders

45. “Entertainment today constantly emphasises the message that things are wonderful the way they are. But there is another kind of cinema, which says that change is possible and necessary and it’s up to you.”

— Wim Wenders

46. “For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it.”

— Wim Wenders

47. “There are a lot of things that dancers can do that actors cannot and actors can do that dancers cannot.”

— Wim Wenders

48. “Take opera for example – to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money.”

— Wim Wenders

49. “In the late 1980s the amount of German films was down to four or five percent of the market, and the remaining 95 percent were American. It is now 20 to 30 percent German productions.”

— Wim Wenders

50. “Many French directors, having now realised there was no more real criticism, that the standards of the past have gone, are very offended about the quality of film criticism.”

— Wim Wenders