Quotes from Errol Morris

A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

There are endless anxieties in putting a film together, and it's an enormous relief when you know it's working with an audience.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.

Listening to what people were saying wasn't even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to what people are saying.

Do I like tawdry, sleazy stories? Yeah, I do.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.

The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.

There's this crazy thinking that style guarantees truth. You go out with a hand-held camera, use available light, and somehow the truth emerges.

There is such a thing as truth, but we have a vested interest in not seeing it, in avoiding it.

Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.

Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along.

Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again - and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here!

We all know that yellow journalism didn't just happen a week ago or a month ago, that yellow journalism has probably been with us as long as journalism has been with us.

I think an interview, properly considered, should be an investigation. You shouldn't know what the interview will yield. Otherwise, why do it at all?

I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful.

It's so much easier to make a movie about someone who is so likeable that you just want to get out of the way.

I actually felt diminished by watching [Donald Trump's]. If this is what discourse has become in America, who even wants to know about it? It's just too demoralizing and unsettling.

You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.

My advice to all interviewers is: Shut up and listen. It's harder than it sounds.

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.