Werner Herzog Quotes

With the most primitive means the artist creates something which the most ingenious and efficient technology will never be able to create.

People frequently believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in the particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined.

Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

I don't think you need to be so result-oriented when you're trying to define the success of an art work. I think we can allow some unpredictability.

Creativity...involves the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things, to move freely in the realm of the imagination, to create and recreate worlds fully in one's mind-while supervising all this with a critical inner eye.

The practise of an art is essential to the whole man, not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

A "critic" is a man who creates nothing.

Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.

To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.

To be creative, a person has to internalize the entire system that makes creativity possible. Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever is at hand to reach their goals.

Creativity is just connecting things.

Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

An artist must have imagination. An artist who does not use his imagination is a mechanic.

There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love.

I think to be creative you have to resist taking the easy path.

See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that - but he's got to think differently in order to do it. He's got to play above what he knows - far above it. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great art and music happens.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

If you think of a school drawing while you work, your drawing will look like one.

In order to be creative, you have to know how to prepare to be creative.

Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn't work.

Being creative is at the heart of being human and of all cultural progress.