Top 30 Errol Morris Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Ecstatic absurdity: it’s the confrontation with meaninglessness.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.