Errol Morris Quotes

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

I think you've got be willing as an interviewer to ask the dumb question every now and then.

I don't talk a lot when I interview. My job is to get out of the way.

My basic approach to interviewing is to ask the basic questions that might even sound naive, or not intellectual. Sometimes when you ask the simple questions like 'Who are you?' or 'What do you do?' you learn the most.

My advice to all interviewers is: Shut up and listen. It's harder than it sounds.

When you're interviewing someone, even your mother - you have to sort of deal with you have to get some objective space from yourself and the person but you also have to find what's the best way to get the information from that person.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

As an FBI agent, you don't want to go in there gangbusters and confrontational. You are going to get a lot more information if you put the subject at ease and allow them to talk.

My policy with interviewing is I'm not there to teach the people I'm across from a lesson.

The key to being a good interviewer is to listen, no matter how heinous the act that person has committed, you have to listen to them and ask the right questions to get the truth out.

I take pride in how I interview people. One of the things people come to our show for most is the interaction I have with the artists; it feels very peer-to-peer.

Reminding myself that listening is just as important a creative act as thinking is key for me.

I have always had extraordinarily good relations with very conservative colleagues. And that's not because I agree with any of them or fudge on my positions, but people feel I listen to them and give them the benefit of the doubt. I assume the best of people. And that, I think, is an attitude that is maybe rare in politics.

A lot of people involved with celebrity journalism have interesting ideas about the people they want to write about going into the interview. Then as soon as they actually sit down with that person, they basically ask the questions they think journalists are supposed to ask, and they start viewing themselves almost as a peer of the subject. Like they're going to become friends. That's why most celebrity journalism is so terrible.

Now before going to a party, I just tell myself to listen with affection to anyone who talks to me... to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or arguing or changing the subject. No. My attitude is: "Tell me more. This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think, not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he will be wonderfully alive."

Don't be an examiner, be the interested inquirer.

I think we waste a lot of time trying to convince other people that we're right. A lot of times we don't actually care what another person thinks, we just want to say what we think. To hear it reflected back to us and that we're okay, to hear that we have been understood and that we're correct - so that we can continue to be who we are in the ways we've been being, and we have nothing to feel bad about and everything is just fine. Even if what we're talking about is, like, police brutality.

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

I don't just want to talk to the choir. I want to sit down and be respectful of the people who are most unlike me, to get them to hear me and think. It doesn't mean you're going to change them right there, but just so they can hear you and what you're saying.

When you are interviewing someone, you have a chance to follow up, to press, to dig in. In a debate there's 30 seconds for the other guy, too. And the goal is to get them to engage with each other, not to engage you necessarily.

I have often heard that the outstanding man is he who thinks deeply about a problem, and the next is he who listens carefully to advice.

I think we should all learn to listen more to America.

I'm a good listener. I think it's the one characteristic that's most important. I've always been that way. Not that I take all the advice, but you've got to listen to it and have the courage to make your own decision. Then I just go for it.

Be eager to lend a patient ear to the opinions of others and think long and hard whether whoever finds fault has reason or not to censure you. And if the answer is yes, correct the fault. If no, give the impression that you have not heard him, or if he is a man whom you respect, explain to him why he is mistaken.

...what's always exciting is when you hear something amazing when you least expected it. Every now and then I'll hear something for the first time that forces me to re-examine my frames of reference, and re-consider musical parameters in general, and that's wonderful . And what's even more wonderful in a way, is when you hear something that you know, and already think you have an opinion about, and then suddenly discover that it isn't what you thought it was, but something quite different, which makes it just as surprising as if you'd never heard it before. That's REALLY great!