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.

Roger Ebert was the last mammoth alive who was holding the flag for real movies and moviemakers.

May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.

Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this?

There's more substance in my prose and my poetry than in all my films together. Writing is a more direct way of expressing yourself because, in cinema, you always have finances, organization, actors, technical apparatus and all that stuff coming in between.

[This kind of strange mythology about me.] I've pulled a huge steamboat over a mountain; I've done a feature film with all the actors acting under hypnosis - things that are very unusual.

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