Errol Morris Quotes

I think you've got be willing as an interviewer to ask the dumb question every now and then.

I think the key to being a journalist is getting your subject to feel comfortable enough to talk about stuff they want to talk about and the stuff they like and don't like, and still feel comfortable about it.

You have to learn to ask questions in a way that will elicit more nuanced answers, rather than the answers you would like to get.

To some extent, I'm mildly surprised by every new piece, by the precise path that my interest takes.

Anyone must be mainly ignorant or thoughtless, who is surprised at everything he sees; or wonderfully conceited who expects everything to conform to his standard of propriety.

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

To me, the best purpose of an interview would be to illuminate some things about how somebody works for the benefit of somebody else who wants to do those things. And that's not where most interviews go at all, so to me, they seem like strange exercises in small talk and wasted air.

Some people are all quality; you would think they are made up of nothing but title and genealogy. The stamp of dignity defaces in them the very character of humanity and transports them to such a degree of haughtiness that they reckon it below themselves to exercise either good nature or good manners.

Civilization will reach maturity only when it learns to value diversity of character and of ideas.

I really do believe that people surprise you. And one of the powerful things about novels is that they're about characters, and those characters live their lives.

I don't like to have everything all worked out in my head because there's always a chance of it coming out different than you think it should anyway.

I'm wonderfully self-lacerating, probably to my character's detriment. I'm terribly open to critique.

[And on going from character to leading actor] I don't approach anything differently; I just approach it as a character. I'm always astounded at the fact that I've ever played a leading character in anything [Laughs]. And my wife concurs with that, frankly. She always thought I would be, at best, the wacky neighbor on a sitcom, so this is all just a surprise and a joy.

People say that the brain is a muscle and that one of the best exercises for any brain is learning another language and to switch from one to another as much as you can. I've found out that when I have trouble regarding any character or any particular scene in English, sometimes I'll switch to Spanish and I'll solve the problem that I've encountered. If I'm working in Spanish and I don't know how to approach certain scenes or certain emotions, or how to say this and that, I just switch to English to try to solve it that way and it works.

I have one talent, and that is the capacity to be tremendously surprised, surprised at life, at ideas. This is to me the supreme Hasidic imperative: Don't be old. Don't be stale.

Condemnation without investigation is the height of ignorance

It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.

the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner.

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

Whenever you do judge, the only basis of judgment is not your own perspective or anything else, it's the very character and nature of God and that's why we are to allow Him to exercise His justice, where I personally want to take it upon myself.

So it was doing all this research or going to the archives or doing all these interviews or traveling, and then trying as much as I can to delete all of that research in a later draft so that all the reader cares about is the characters.

It's silly to build a wall around your interests.

Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.

I think a lot of things can be misconstrued in a lot of ways. And I think if people open their minds more, and they try to look deeper into something than just something that is a very big, hot, fiery button to hide behind...I think if people looked into something bigger that I was trying to speak upon, they wouldn't be so easy to fire back silly, miscellaneous things.

I still have a problem with nuns. I follow them around like a kitten with a ball of yarn.