Werner Herzog

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

You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.

If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it.

Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.

Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.

I don't see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.

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

Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs.

If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.

I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.

If your project has real substance, ultimately the money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs.

I see planets that don't exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed.

I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony, a defect I have had ever since I was able to think independently.

Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

We have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...]

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.

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.

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

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.