I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.

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.

Fear and love were sometimes the same thing both necessary unavoidable. Now she understood that it was okay to bleed if you know how to heal.

If you can get to be you, why can't I get to be me?

I am ready to burn up but not ready to rust down.

Economists often like startling theorems, results which seem to run counter to conventional wisdom.

Passion is more important than justice.

If you feel like getting a divorce, you are no exception to the general rule.

That made me feel good, not to go to a resort where outside the door is extreme poverty

Living is having and following a purpose. That's all.

Ancestry is most important to those who have done nothing themselves.

Bio-technology is the science of the future.