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

— Werner Herzog

Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?

— Werner Herzog

At the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. He said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. Someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'When the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again

— Werner Herzog

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

— Werner Herzog

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.

— 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

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.

— Werner Herzog

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.

— Werner Herzog

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.

— Werner Herzog

I prefer to be alive, so I'm cautious about taking risks.

— Werner Herzog