I would say for everyday I build buildings or houses like a bricklayer with canvas and paint.

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.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, evidence of things not seen.

I can tell you this: there will be other girls, other disasters. And there will be nights to come, his life mostly behind him, when he will long to hurt like that again.

Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of interests.

There is no shame in not knowing something. The shame is in not being willing to learn.

You just have to stand and grit your teeth and know your poll numbers are going to go down - and mine have - but you gotta grit through it because the alternative is unacceptable.

People allow themselves to get distracted; I think ultimately, probably the biggest thing that gets in the way of people doing what they ought to be doing at any point in time is distraction.

You're a part of me. I'm a part of you and we are all a part of this great nothingness.

God sends a curst cow short horns.

Evil has no need to bother with eliminating Good. It's far simpler to let Good fight against itself.

The consciousness of lucid dreaming is a cultural evolution. It's something that we are talking about and learning about, not biological evolution.