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Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It's an ego trip, and I'm not on an ego trip. I don't have ambitions - I have a vision.

Werner Herzog

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Werner Herzog
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: September 5
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München
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Fastest
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More quotes by Werner Herzog

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Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch.
Werner Herzog
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We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.
Werner Herzog
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Ten years ago in Antarctica shooting Encounters at the End of the World, I met a very fine volcanologist from Cambridge University [Clive Oppenheimer] and we kept talking about doing a film and all of a sudden it became serious when he hinted at the possibility to film in North Korea.
Werner Herzog
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This is the birth of the modern human soul. The artists are like us, not like the Neanderthals, who had no culture - and who incidentally were still roaming the landscape at the time the paintings were made. It is striking that there is a distant cultural echo that seems to reach all the way down to us, over dozens of millennia.
Werner Herzog
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Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal.
Werner Herzog
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What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.
Werner Herzog
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By the way, today with digital cameras and editing on your laptop, and things like that, you can make a feature film, a narrative feature film easily for $10,000.
Werner Herzog
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Tourism is a mortal sin.
Werner Herzog
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I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.
Werner Herzog
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Roger Ebert was the last mammoth alive who was holding the flag for real movies and moviemakers.
Werner Herzog
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I'm not a citizen of America, I cannot vote. But it is fascinating because there's a new kind of protagonist out there that we didn't expect. By the way, I'm not in any panic at all.
Werner Herzog
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I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.
Werner Herzog
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If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!
Werner Herzog
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I doubt that VR will really replace the quality of books. If you want to go into let's say the Prado in Madrid and you want to go into Hieronymus Bosch or whatever, you'd rather go into books and you take your time and it's sitting there all day long and you go back and revisit it and it becomes part of your physical life.
Werner Herzog
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What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.
Werner Herzog
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Well, it had to be about the stories and the people who live under the volcano, what kind of new gods do they create? What sort of demons? And of course North Korea falls clearly into this category since the socialist revolution at the end of the Second World War. Somehow they adopted the myth of the power and dynamics of their volcano.
Werner Herzog
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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.
Werner Herzog
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It doesn't matter whether you shoot on celluloid or on digital, you better make a good film.
Werner Herzog
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When the camera is looking back at our planet Earth, it's the tiniest of specks somewhere out there in the universe. So we do have a new sense of proportion. Of course the volcanoes and the magma under us just remind us of that.
Werner Herzog
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I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with.
Werner Herzog