Errol Morris

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

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

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along.

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

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

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.

When 'The Thin Blue Line' came out, I was criticized by many people for using reenactments, as if I wasn't dedicated to the truth because I filmed these scenes. That always and still seems to be nonsensical.

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

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

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.

You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.