Top 162 Quotes & Sayings by Errol Morris

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.

But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along.

I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble.

Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest.

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

The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

If we're reading a first-person account, we know that each and every one of us, myself included, have a great desire to be seen in a certain way, or to be perceived in a certain way. It's unavoidable.

What's great about documentary, 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.'

First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories.

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.

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

I like to think that I'm nonjudgmental, that I can listen and be engaged by almost anything.

Do I like tawdry, sleazy stories? Yeah, I do.

I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing.

A lot of stories that have fascinated me are tabloid stories that have come from other newspapers, like 'The New York Times.'

Listening to what people were saying wasn't even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to what people are saying.

I think an interview, properly considered, should be an investigation. You shouldn't know what the interview will yield. Otherwise, why do it at all?

Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again - and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here!

If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing.

I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

People lie, and they always are very very creative in finding new ways to lie.

There are endless anxieties in putting a film together, and it's an enormous relief when you know it's working with an audience.

You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

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

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

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

I've never had any problem with crazy people. I like crazy people; I probably am a crazy person myself.

We all know that yellow journalism didn't just happen a week ago or a month ago, that yellow journalism has probably been with us as long as journalism has been with us.

When 'The Thin Blue Line' came out, I was criticized by many people for using reenactments, as if I wasn't dedicated to the truth because I filmed these scenes. That always and still seems to be nonsensical.

When you're working for yourself and your own obsession with finding the truth, you're at your own mercy.

Films are neither true nor false. That includes my films, as well as others. They may make claims that are true or false, but films are too complex. They have too many ingredients.

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

You know, I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them.

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.

I taught my son to read with tabloids. We would sit to read the 'Weekly World News' together.

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.

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.

I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs.

Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

People think in narratives - in beginnings, middles and ends. The danger when you edit something too severely is that it no longer makes sense; worse still, it leaves people with the disquieting impression that something is being hidden.

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.

If you told me thirty years ago that people would be parodying documentary films, I never would have believed it. It wasn't clear that the films themselves even had an audience, let alone an audience for parodies of them.

If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.

There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that's out of control, that's not controlled by me. And that element is the words, the language that people use, what they say in an interview. They're not written, not rehearsed. It's spontaneous, extemporaneous material. People

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

I think we get into all kinds of difficulty by saying photographs should be taken in a certain way which guarantees their veracity. I think that's a slippery slope to hell.

I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité.

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

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

We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.

Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It's a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.

The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.