Quotes from 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.

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.

Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are.

Perhaps I seek certain utopian things, space for human honour and respect, landscapes not yet offended, planets that do not exist yet, dreamed landscapes.

I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.

I'm a very professional man. I'm not out for the experience of adventure.

I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books.

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.

Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.

Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.

Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

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

In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.

People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder.

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.

May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.

If you're purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn't illuminate.

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.