Errol Morris Quotes

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

I think the films Insomnia and Memento share all sorts of thematic concerns, such as the relationship between motivation and action, and the difficulty of reconciling your view of the story with the supposed objective view of that story.

I believe that this whole question of some photography being true and some untrue is a non-question. Photography is not objective; it never was objective.

Photographs are interpretations of reality; as such, it is entirely subjective. Most photos are taken with an agenda, to sell something or to make a subject look better than it really is. Think of family snapshots - everyone is smiling and happy.

What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.

A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.

Americans live in a free country, which allows you to believe what you want. Because you think that something is true does not require that it is objectively true. The value of science concerning itself with objective truths is that we can make decisions and statements that affect everyone, which is why legislation really should be based on objective truths, not what is going on in your head.

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.

If truth is not acceptable, it becomes the imagination of others.

I never said the camera was truth. It is, however, a more accurate and more objective way of seeing.

Any claims on the truth in my pictures are only to be answered in the sense that a particular event did in fact happen and did take place in the here and now.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

I never aspire to be objective because I don't believe in objectivity. It's important to be truthful, and it's important to make sure that the audience has a solid sense of what the expectation should be of a particular film.

It is not to everyone's taste that truth should be pronounced pleasant. But at least let no one believe that error becomes truth when it is pronounced unpleasant.

We live in an age rather skeptical of truth, of its existence." There is a "tendency to believe that nothing is definitive, and think that the truth is given by consent or by what we want. The question arises: does "the" truth really exist? What is "the" truth? Can we know it? Can we find it?

Reality has actually very little to do with truth; there is no necessary connection between the two.

Truth is a matter of the imagination.

A fact is not a truth until you love it.

Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. "Things as they are" are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become "things as perceived by your wishes.

I don’t believe there are two sides to every argument. I think the facts are the center. And watching the news abandon the facts in favor of “fairness” is what’s troubling to me.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

Of course, there are different truths on different levels. Things are true relative to other things; "long" and "short" relate to each other, "high" and "low," and so on. But is there any absolute truth? Something self-sufficient, independently true in itself? I don't think so.