Errol Morris Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Errol Morris

  Believe, Opposites, Seeing Is Believing

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• 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

  Mean, Trying, Quests

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• 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

  Believe, Self, Deception

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• 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

  People, Historical, Archives

  Interview with Nick Poppy, www.believermag.com. April 2004.

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• 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

  Ideas, People, Facts

  Source: www.believermag.com

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

  Errol Morris

  People, Interviews, Stuff

  Interview With Scott Tobias, film.avclub.com. April 23, 2008.

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• 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.

  Errol Morris

  Self, People, Deception

  Source: collider.com

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• 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

  Character, Exercise, Interest

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• 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

  Needs, Want, Way

  "Photography as a Weapon". opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com. August 11, 2008.

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• 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

  Confused, Drama, Two

  Interview with Nick Poppy, www.believermag.com. April 2004.

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

  Errol Morris

  Errors, Understanding, World

  "Belief". Errol Morris' foreword to the book "The Secret Parts of Fortune" by Ron Rosenbaum, www.errolmorris.com. January 2000.

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• The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.

  Errol Morris

  Reality, Different, World

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• 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

  Crazy, Thinking, Light

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• 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

  Strong, Mean, People

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• 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

  Thinking, Support, World

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• 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

  Believe, Ideas, Two

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Narrative

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

  Errol Morris

  People, Doe, Guarantees

  Source: www.believermag.com

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

  Errol Morris

  Past, Infancy Is, History

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• 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

  Ideas, People, Interviews

  Interview with Nick Poppy, www.believermag.com. April 2004.

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• Truth exists independent of style. It involves all kinds of issues. Properly considered, it's a quest, a pursuit. To say that vérité is more truthful than something that is narrated is just misplaced. Completely wrong. And the fact that people still talk about it as though they're really talking about something... it puzzles me greatly. A moment of reflection about it tells you that it makes no sense!

  Errol Morris

  Independent, Reflection, People

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• 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

  Glasses, Done, Copies

  Source: collider.com

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• 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

  Taken, Thinking, Guarantees

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

  Errol Morris

  Behavior, Ability, Skeptical

  "The Anti-Post-Modern Post-Modernist". Lecture by Errol Morris, errolmorris.com.

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• I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.

  Errol Morris

  Excuse, Ends, Explanation

  "New Morris Film Traps McNamara in a Fog of War" by Ron Rosenbaum, observer.com. September 29, 2003.

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