Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’ This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.
It happens sometimes that the material itself carries things you have not fully planned. The footage has its own right, its own life, its own vibrancy and energy in it.
I have nothing against 3D films but I do not need to see them.
I find it interesting that there are impostors out on the Internet pretending to be 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.
Of course, as a German, I wouldn’t like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.
I prefer to be alive, so I’m cautious about taking risks.
There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone.
In Germany, you would be hanged if you cracked a joke about Hitler and you would be killed by the state if you were insane in a project of euthanasia.
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.
It is only through writing that I become myself.
In the evening I finished reading a book, and because I was feeling so alone, I buried the book on the edge of the forest with a borrowed spade.
Truth itself wanders through the forests.
Americans believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are the most exotic people in the world right now.
A perfect morning; in perfect harmony with myself I’m walking briskly uphill... For once I didn’t notice that I was walking, all the way up to the mountaintop forest I was absorbed in deep thought. Perfect clarity and freshness in the air, up further there’s some snow. The tangerines make me completely euphoric.
I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.
What’s really bad is that after acknowledging a wrong decision, I don’t have the nerve to turn back, since I’d rather correct myself with another wrong decision.
Friendship is possible with mice.
It’s a great metaphor. For what? I don’t know to this day. But I know it’s a great metaphor.
Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of the mind.
Perseverance is where the gods dwell.