We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution.

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 universe couldn't care less about us. I say this very clearly in the film [ "Into the Inferno"]: our planet is "indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles and vapid humans alike."

When you look at any of my films you will immediately be able to tell this is a [Werner] Herzog film. Even if you didn't have any credits, in two minutes flat you would know.

You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia.

People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder.

Only the poets can hold the country together, and I wanted to hold Germany together.