Wim Wenders Quotes

I'm getting a little bored by the juxtaposition of American and other cinema. I no longer think this division is as true as it might have been in the 1980s, or the early part of the 90s.

Without dreams, there can be no courage. And without courage, there can be no action.

Take opera for example - to go to the opera you have to dress up in a tuxedo and pay lots of money.

My advice is, don't spend money on therapy. Spend it in a record store.

Every photo, every 'ONCE' in time is also the beginning of a story starting 'once upon a time...' Every photo is the first frame of a movie.

Film is a very, very powerful medium. It can either confirm the idea that things are wonderful the way they are, or it can reinforce the conception that things can be changed.

The more opinions you have, the less you see.

I think sometimes you have to just imagine something that looks pretty impossible. By imagining something that is impossible, automatically you wish you could make it possible.

For years all I seemed to be doing was lobbying politicians and others to persuade them that European culture needed movies, and that we had to protect it.

Photographs put time into such a perspective. They humble us and our selfish memories.

Any film that supports the idea that things can be changed is a great film in my eyes.

I think seeing happens partly through the eyes, but not entirely.

But I think that the spirit of protectionism would be the grave of European cinema. You cannot protect something by building a fence around it and thinking that this will help it survive.

The last adventure left on this planet is creativity because we've been everywhere. There's not much left to explore. But there's a lot of exploration left in the human imagination.

Final cut is overrated. Only fools keep insisting on always having the final word. The wise swallow their pride in order to get to the best possible cut.

Everything is entertainment; criticism is now entertainment and it seems that the French directors have woken up one day and suddenly realised that they were not backed up any more.

Movies are something people see all over the world because there is a certain need for it.

I sometimes feel fiction is the ideal preservation for real memories. Fiction is such a good place to keep things.

Butte was once a grand city. To me, that city is like one big stage for Edward Hopper. You could put your camera anywhere, and you felt you were looking at his paintings.

There are a lot of things that dancers can do that actors cannot and actors can do that dancers cannot.

Whoever came up first with that saying a picture is worth a thousand words didn't understand the first thing about either one.

The Yanks have colonized our subconscious.

In this age of consumerism film criticism all over the world - in America first but also in Europe - has become something that caters for the movie industry instead of being a counterbalance.

The most important question for me when I begin working on a film is where to start. For a book, what makes you convinced there is a story that is worthwhile?

So I am getting a little bored with defining one type of film as American and the other European or from somewhere else because the division is no longer true.

Cinema is a worldwide phenomenon.

Ibrahim tells his story without a grain of complaint, and this was true for all of the band members. This is very much part of the Cuban spirit and soul.

Filmmakers and critics wrote about each other and sometimes very harshly. This no longer exists.

Of course the French are making very credible movies and it is still one of the greatest nations in terms of world cinema but the real problem is the decay in film criticism.

The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.

For us music is mainly part of the entertainment world and is often a luxury.

Filmmaking is really connected to life and all of the expressions that different arts found to allow access to life. Filmmaking touches on all of it.

Many French directors, having now realised there was no more real criticism, that the standards of the past have gone, are very offended about the quality of film criticism.

The Cuban people have an amazingly strong and unbroken spirit.

It's almost scary how stylish things can look if you take the color out - how much more you see the essence of things and how much more something can appear elegant.

Maybe it's the music that enables them to function like that, to always take everything as it comes and never complain about the misery, hardship or injustice.

In fact, it is amazing how much European films - Italian, French, German and English - have recovered a certain territory of the audience in their countries over the last few years.

I heard that Trump said even smelling a book makes him feel tired.

The beautiful image today means nothing. It's worthshit. In fact, it's almost as if it has the opposite effect, becauseyou're just like everything else out there.

Don't worry about getting final cut, worry about making the best possible cut.

In books they don't have deleted scenes, like with DVDs. You could have your deleted scene in a book as well!

I can't do a million things anymore like I could when I was younger.

In the late 1980s the amount of German films was down to four or five percent of the market, and the remaining 95 percent were American. It is now 20 to 30 percent German productions.

What is generally referred to as American-style films are, in fact, studio productions.

It's a great lesson in modesty that you realize you're illiterate in a field that you think you're an expert in.

Before you say cut, wait 5 seconds

I remember that even my first impression of Italian cinema was pictures by paparazzi because my mom was reading all of these trash magazines with paparazzo pictures.