Errol Morris Quotes

The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.

The very idea of photography is as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the 19th century, "it's a mirror with a memory."

I like to think that every movie emerges from the conversations.

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?

The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.

A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.

I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.

It's really hard to know why certain artists become famous and others don't.

The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.

Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do."

I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.

People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.

My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.

What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary."

A movie is like a tip of an iceberg, in a way, because so little of what you do in connection with making a movie actually gets into the movie. Almost everything gets left behind.

You can't tell by looking at a film-clip whether it is a drama or a documentary without knowing how it was produced.

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.

Language can be used to so many diverse ends. It can be used to clarify and, of course, it can be used to obfuscate, confuse, evade.

But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.

I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning.

There is only one direction. (Down.) There is only one color. (Black.) And there is only one number (Zero.)

I've been horribly depressed (lately), which, as you know, can be terribly time-consuming. I mean, if you're going to do it right, that is.

I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn't controlled anymore.

I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.

The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular.

Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious.

Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.