Errol Morris

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”