Werner Herzog quotes
Born
5 September 1942, Munich, Germany.
Occupation
Screenwriter, director, actor.
Werner Herzog is a German screenwriter, director and actor.
I don’t spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.
– Werner Herzog
I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.
– Werner Herzog
Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There’s no doubt in my heart.
– Werner Herzog
I live my life outside of the glitz and glamour of the red carpet events, and so you’ll never see me there. I’m never at parties.
– Werner Herzog
Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.
– Werner Herzog
The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
– Werner Herzog
I’m not an activist.
– Werner Herzog
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.
– Werner Herzog
I do other sorts of things. I act in other people’s movies. I direct operas. I write books.
– Werner Herzog
Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It’s an ego trip, and I’m not on an ego trip. I don’t have ambitions – I have a vision.
– Werner Herzog
I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.
– Werner Herzog
I’m a very professional man. I’m not out for the experience of adventure.
– Werner Herzog
Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it’s not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it’s not your fault.
– Werner Herzog
I prefer to be alive, so I’m cautious about taking risks.
– Werner Herzog
Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
– Werner Herzog
You should look straight at a film; that’s the only way to see one. Film is not the art of scholars but of illiterates.
– Werner Herzog
I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.
– Werner Herzog
I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be Werner Herzog.
– Werner Herzog
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
I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can’t get rid of them. I did not invite them.
– Werner Herzog
If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn’t matter whether you’re bold or cowardly, or whether you’re stupid or intelligent. Doesn’t get you anywhere.
– Werner Herzog
You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn’t mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that’s what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.
– Werner Herzog
The universe is not harmonious: you know that by looking outside.
– Werner Herzog
I’m the last one who would do self-analysis.
– Werner Herzog
Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes.
– Werner Herzog
I have a great map of the Tibesti Mountains in the southern Sahara or Northern Chad. It’s a dream of mine to go there, but it’s such a volatile area, you have to be prudent.
– Werner Herzog
I’m not very eager to sit and look at my films all the time.
– Werner Herzog
I cannot work fast enough. I cannot cope fast enough, really. And just releasing a film is hard.
– Werner Herzog
If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.
– Werner Herzog