110+ Errol Morris Quotes On Writing, Silence And Nature

Errol Morris is an American documentary filmmaker. He is known for his use of the Interrotron, a device that allows interviewees to look directly into the camera while speaking to Morris. His films often focus on the stories of controversial figures and explore the nature of truth and power. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Errol Morris on writing, silence, nature.

Top 10 Errol Morris Quotes

1. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
2. People like nonfiction presented to them in a certain way, so that they don't have to think about whether it's true or not. They like it to have that imprimatur of respectability, of genuineness.
3. They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.
4. 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.
5. The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.
6. Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.
7. What's interesting is that Citizen Kane was meant as an anti-fascist/anti-capitalist melodrama and for Donald Trump it becomes just another kind of misogynistic claim that misses the point.
8. The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.
9. I think calling someone a character is a compliment.
10. 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.

Errol Morris Short Quotes

• The first Polaroid ever took of someone in my family was my son when he was about four years old.
• The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.
• Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second.
• I don't think that anybody really makes films quite like mine. That's maybe true of any filmmaker.
• Mike Wallace's interviews may make great television, but they don't produce great evidence.
• Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.
• I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.
• Long, long before I became a filmmaker I was talking to killers. Filmmaking was an after thought.
• It's pretty clear that fame isn't inextricably connected with merit .
• It's really hard to know why certain artists become famous and others don't.

Errol Morris Quotes About Writing

I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn't controlled anymore. — Errol Morris

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways. — Errol Morris

I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things. — Errol Morris

Errol Morris Quotes About Movie

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. — Errol Morris

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! — Errol Morris

I like to think that every movie emerges from the conversations. — Errol Morris

I actually wanted to publish [ interview with Donald Trump about Citizen Kane] in the New York Times, but the circumstances under which I did that movie made me vulnerable to a lawsuit and at this point in my career, I don't want to go there. But it's amazing. — Errol Morris

Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

The way I go about making a movie... even the ones that are interview-driven, I go into them not knowing what's going to happen, and feeling my way through. — Errol Morris

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

It's so much easier to make a movie about someone who is so likeable that you just want to get out of the way. — Errol Morris

Errol Morris Quotes About Truth

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. — Errol Morris

There's this crazy thinking that style guarantees truth. You go out with a hand-held camera, use available light, and somehow the truth emerges. — Errol Morris

All alone - shorn of context, without captions - a photograph is neither true nor false.... For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world. — Errol Morris

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

The chance that any given sentence is a lie, rather than a truth, I think, is fairly great. An intentional lie, a self-deception, a misconception - there are lots of categories of untruth, not one grab bag. And hotographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things. — Errol Morris

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

The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity. — Errol Morris

Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language. — Errol Morris

There is such a thing as truth, but we have a vested interest in not seeing it, in avoiding it. — Errol Morris

Errol Morris Quotes About People

I probably wouldn't have done [ Fred Leuchter story] if it was just a story about an executioner or a holocaust denier, but the combination of the two elements was irresistible. So yeah, I find it strange that there are so many people out there now. — Errol Morris

Not suing others does not mean that others won't sue you.If people are desperate enough to think that they can gain some kind of financial advantage, they'll sue. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

It's a kind of honour when I see how many people are imitating the style of how I make films. — Errol Morris

Appearing on the front page of the New York Times even given the state of papers today is still something that's seen by a lot of people. — Errol Morris

Simply coming to the perpetrator and delivering the message is Nozick's definition of revenge. And in that sense, Adi is exacting revenge. When people ask, "Does Adi want revenge?" - they mean violent revenge. But in Nozick's formulation, it is revenge. That is the essence of revenge. — Errol Morris

People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake. [...] You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster. — Errol Morris

I used to work as a private detective years and years ago. And my boss gave me this one very simple piece of advice about trying to figure out who to interview first in any investigation. His recommendation: Always pick the people who were fired. Pick the people who are pissed off. — Errol Morris

One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

Errol Morris Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

I've done interviews in one day that went on for fifteen, sixteen hours. And at a certain point, the control over what they're saying breaks down; it becomes different. It becomes really powerful, and for me, real. It becomes out of control. — Errol Morris

Part of the mystery of any given photograph is the fact that it was taken at a certain time and in a certain place and time keeps moving on. A photograph might be a moment in time preserved, but the world continues to change around it. — Errol Morris

If someone tells you that George Bush is not the 43rd president of the United States, they might be engaged in wishful thinking, or denial, but if they make that claim, it's either true or false! And you can assess that, regardless of whether there's an omniscient narrator, or an unreliable narrator, or it's shot in vérité, or it's manipulated, it's agitprop, whatever! It makes no difference! It's a style! — Errol Morris

Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest. And many, many, if not most interviews have that character. The interviewer who comes in with a list of bullet points they're going to address one after the other. Interviews, properly considered, should be investigative. You should not know what you're going to hear. You should be surprised. — Errol Morris

I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning. — Errol Morris

I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary. — Errol Morris

You can ask yourself, if a film makes a claim, is the claim true or false? Having said that, a style of presenting material doesn't guarantee truth. There's this crazy idea that somehow you pick a style, and by virtue of picking the style, you've provided something that is more truthful. It's as if you imagine that changing the font on a sentence you write makes it more truthful. — Errol Morris

You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite. — Errol Morris

Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious. — Errol Morris

I used to live in New York City, then when my son was two years old we moved to Cambridge Massachusetts and we've been there ever since. My son is now twenty-nine years old, so we've been up there for a while. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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 — Errol Morris

There are many dramas that I would like to make: dramas based on real stories. It's approaching things from the other side. — Errol Morris

Language can be used to so many diverse ends. It can be used to clarify and, of course, it can be used to obfuscate, confuse, evade. — Errol Morris

The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate [with Donald Trump]. — Errol Morris

Maybe today I would call Fred Leuchter and there would be two or three other documentary filmmakers interested in his story simply because of the exposure. — Errol Morris

There is something about the photographs that is endlessly disturbing. The fact that we like to think of them as torture actually hides what is really deeply offensive about them. — Errol Morris

I've had people turn me down. Not all that many, but certainly it happens. — Errol Morris

Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do." — Errol Morris

There are artists who are very well known and many of us feel they should be less well known, while there are others who aren't well known and many feel deserve more attention. — Errol Morris

In fact, part of the Netflix series is drama.Beyond re-enactments. Why not invent something new? — Errol Morris

I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence. — Errol Morris

Truth is a pursuit, it's a quest. And proof is certainly in the pudding in this particular instance, because the film, and the evidence accumulated in making the film, led to this man's release from prison. And that's hardly ever happened, if it's happened at all, in any other film that I can think of. — Errol Morris

What's great about documentary genre, 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." — Errol Morris

[Elsa Dorfman]was well known. Certainly in the Boston area, she's well known as a portrait photographer. My wife always wanted to meet her and then there was some benefit where she was taking pictures. — Errol Morris

Recently it's become much to my surprise, something that does happen. For example, I used to get almost all of my stories, and it's probably still true, from newspapers. Primarily from The New York Times. No one ever really thinks of The New York Times as a tabloid newspaper and it isn't a tabloid newspaper. But there is a tabloid newspaper within The New York Times very, very often. — Errol Morris

I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular. — Errol Morris

You know, anything more negative, anything more disparaging, anything more adversarial than what [Donald Trump] does already. The mystery is how he's gotten as far as he's gotten. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

Basically, "Making a Murderer" chronicles a set of crimes committed in Wisconsin: Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The first crime is a miscarriage of justice. Steven Avery is convicted and sentenced to a very, very long prison sentence for the assault on a woman. And it comes to light through DNA evidence that he was not the assailant. — Errol Morris

The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing. — Errol Morris

War is such a peculiar thing - inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning - even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops — Errol Morris

I like to think that I differ from other interviewers in the sense that I hide my agenda more successfully, and I'm more open to hearing stuff that is surprising and unexpected. That I'm actually involved in an investigation, through monologue, at times. — Errol Morris

Twenty to thirty years ago, who was making documentary films? Nobody. Well, relatively few people. It was an art form that had limited theatrical distribution, if any at all. Some television distribution, but relatively small audiences regardless. And in the intervening years it's become more and more popular with a lot of people. — Errol Morris

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end. — Errol Morris

I'm one simple way I think I've succeeded was capturing Elsa [Dorfman]. There's something about Elsa, her personality, and her work that I believe is there. — Errol Morris

You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph. — Errol Morris

We have more information - a glut of information - than ever before, and perhaps less knowledge. That's what's peculiar. And the only way you can deal with it, I suppose, is to make fun of it. I would rather watch Comedy Central for the news than I'd like to watch any other program on television. Maybe that shows you the state of affairs. — Errol Morris

We imagine what this country is, but quite clearly, this country is a mystery. I mean, one of the reasons I did the election ads is, I thought I could learn something. Like, what the hell is going on? I think anybody - particularly a person of leftist persuasion such as myself - who stops and thinks even for a moment, realizes that something strange is going on and we don't quite get it. — Errol Morris

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph. — Errol Morris

I'm asked unendingly to become involved in series involving true crime and as it so happens the Netflix series that I'm working on is about a true crime. — Errol Morris

When you start talking about the known knowns and the unknown unknowns, you're thrown into a crazy meta-level discussion. Do I know what I know, do I know what I don't know, do I know what I don't know I don't know. It becomes a strange, Lewis Carroll - like nursery rhyme. — Errol Morris

Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it. — Errol Morris

We live in a very litigious society. I've never sued anybody. I certainly can imagine a situation where I might sue, but it seems more or less in bad taste. — Errol Morris

Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. An amazing and impressive film. — Errol Morris

The very idea of photography is as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the 19th century, "it's a mirror with a memory." — Errol Morris

There's a line I love in Conan The Barbarian where someone says, "That used to be another snake cult, now I see it everywhere." That's certainly true of documentaries. I wouldn't say it's ubiquitous, but it's become close to ubiquitous. It's everywhere. — Errol Morris

I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories. — Errol Morris

I remember on page one of The New York Times the article about Fred Leuchter. The heading was "Can Capital Punishment Be Humane" and it was the story about an electric chair repairman and execution machine designer. And then buried in the back of the paper was the fact that Fred Leuchter had also been involved in holocaust denial. — Errol Morris

This uses a lens system, which I have used for years in various different ways, but I've never used it in the context of an interview. This is the very first time that I've done that. It's a lens called The Revolution, so it allowed me to interview Elsa [Dorfman] and actually operate the camera. Well one of the cameras, because there were four cameras there. — Errol Morris

I actually felt diminished by watching [Donald Trump's]. If this is what discourse has become in America, who even wants to know about it? It's just too demoralizing and unsettling. — Errol Morris

Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them. The 30-second format is very hard. I sometimes call it American Haiku. And I think some of the commercials I've done are not so bad. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

I asked [Donald Trump] if he had any advice for Charles Foster Kane and he said, "Yeah, get yourself a different woman." — Errol Morris

I've been involved in doing advertising for various elections and I just couldn't see doing anti-Trump advertising in this election. My line has been, "How could you do anything worse that what he does himself?". — Errol Morris

Maybe [killers] is one of my real passions. Why deny it? — Errol Morris

I've been horribly depressed (lately), which, as you know, can be terribly time-consuming. I mean, if you're going to do it right, that is. — Errol Morris

You can't tell by looking at a film-clip whether it is a drama or a documentary without knowing how it was produced. — Errol Morris

Life Lessons by Errol Morris

1. Errol Morris' work demonstrates the power of documentary filmmaking to tell stories of truth and justice.
2. His films often challenge the audience to consider the complexities of the human experience and to think critically about the world.
3. Morris' work serves as a reminder to always seek out the truth and to never take anything at face value.