I dont want to create a monster; I want to make something which is new, exceptional, something that only I do...something that references tradition, but is still new.

The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does.

What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.

I begin with an idea, but as I work, the picture takes over. Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived... and the picture that fights for its own life.

Women don't paint very well. It's a fact. There are, of course, exceptions. Agnes Martin or, from the past, Paula Modersohn-Becker.

An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object.

I had always loved expressionist painting, like every European. In fact I admired it all the more because these were precisely the paintings despised by my father's generation.

Art is visceral and vulgar - it's an eruption.

I hang my work upside down to emphasize surface.

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

What I could never escape was Germany, and being German.

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

If it isn't one blessing, it's another!

Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.

A marriage is like a long trip in a tiny row boat: if one passenger starts to rock the boat, the other has to steady it, otherwise, they will go to the bottom together.

Man is not above nature, but in nature.

As George Costanza would say, when they're applauding, stop.

Desire followed the glance, pleasure followed desire

The sea lives in every one of us.

I got the Rolly on my arm and I'm pouring Chandon And I roll the best weed cause I got it going on.