Nowhere in my collection do I, say, have a Auguste Renoir painting. Because everybody knows that this is a good painter without me having to demonstrate it.

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 more you read, the harder it is to condemn.

Each time a new baby is born there is a possibility of reprieve. Each child is a new being a potential prophet a new spiritual prince a new spark of light precipitated into the outer darkness.

Unless I am a part of everything I am nothing.

I sing all the time but I'd never gotten what it felt like to be in the recording studio, so it was definitely a learning process.

I think all actors are supposed to be character actors.

In order to see Christianity, one must forget all the Christians.

Humans are basically good. That's why it takes so much training to march march march kill kill kill kill.

I sometimes imagine that as one grows older one comes to live a role which as a young person one merely 'played.

That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about.

In the wider context, what I believe I was - the point I was making was that our life experiences do permit us to see some facts and understand them more easily than others.