Werner Herzog Quotes

The way I would describe a pictorial is that it is a picture that makes everybody say ‘Aaaaah,’ with five vowels when they see it. It is something you would like to hang on the wall. The french word ‘photogenique’ defines it better than anything in English. It is a picture which must have quality, drama, and it must, in addition, be as good technically as you can possible make it.

We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold.

Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public.

No amounts of stone and bone could yield the kinds of information that the paintings gave so freely.

There is tragic evidence to show that the paintings at the French prehistoric art sites are deteriorating.

I like to imagine that the Neanderthals were all really good artists.

I have always been fascinated by paleontology and prehistoric people, and I've always thought that one of the most intriguing moments in human history was the birth of artistic imagination. I always loved those cave paintings.

Storytelling is as old as speech. It existed before humans first began to carve shapes in stones and press their hands upon the rocky walls of caves.

Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.

Everything about The Bradshaws is controversial, fluid, uncertain: their age - perhaps 30,000 years old, perhaps older, perhaps more recent - who painted them, what they mean.

Visual storytelling of one kind or another has been around since cavemen were drawing on the walls.

Do cave paintings mean anything? Not really, but I, for one, am happy to have them.

The first time someone stood up in front of the fire and told the story while illustrating it with shadows on the walls of the quarry, that was the birth of theater.

Shouldn't it give us pause that the oldest works of art are as impressive today in their beauty and spontaneity as they were many thousands of years ago?

Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years.

Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs.

Some of the most important caves, like Lascaux in the Dordogne region in France, have had to be closed down. There had been too many people allowed in, and they left a mold on the walls that is spreading and which can't really be stopped.

The definition of who's literate and who's not keeps changing. So, in Neanderthal times, if you painted on a cave wall, that was enough to transmit how you hunt, how you eat, how you cook, how you dress, and we can read about that.

Man needs spiritual expression and nourishing... even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves.

When you see a picture of a woolly mammoth on a cave wall, that's weirdly similar to a person's lasagna that they thought looked delicious.

The real challenge in acting is in comedy. It's easier to get that gasp in a drama. Not easy, because you still have to find that emotional pitch. And when you do something in drama and you hear that sob from the audience it's so fulfilling. But as a comic actor, when the laugh is supposed to come and you punch in that line and nothing happens it is dreadful. It's horrific and you feel like dying right there.

In real life as in grand opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse.

Nobody wants to do it - not real change, not soul change, not the painful molecular change required to truly become who you need to be. Nobody ever does real transformation for fun. Nobody ever does it on a dare. You do it only when your back is so far against the wall that you have no choice anymore.

Sometimes people confuse contrivance and authenticity, and sometimes I think authenticity can get in the way of a good excuse to do something theatrical. I just don't like wasting opportunity - if you're going to do a photo session, if you're going to walk on stage, why not make it interesting?

Evidently one cannot look for long at the Last Supper without ceasing to study it as a composition, and beginning to speak of it as a drama. It is the most literary of all great pictures, one of the few of which the effect may largely be conveyed - can even be enhanced - by description.