Talent seduces us into interpretation. My sister could draw wonderfully, but she would never have hit upon the idea of becoming a painter. I never had that extreme talent.

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.

All the students have shown more advance in two months of summer study than they have in a year of ordinary instruction, largely due to their free and wholesome life in the open air.

You cannot allow any of your people to avoid the brutal facts. If they start living in a dream world, it's going to be bad.

Things are picking up...It's not going to make this thing go away... don't think you're going to find anybody deterred...There's a lot of people willing to die for the cause.

The only place I considered home was the boarding school, in Yorkshire, my parents sent me to.

The importance of repetition until automaticity cannot be overstated. Repetition is the key to learning.

My dad is funny in his own way, and so is my brother, but in terms of legitimately making a lot of people laugh, that's my mom. I inherit my sense of comedy from her.

Knowing how to fight made men more bold, because no one fears doing what it seems to him he has learned to do. Therefore, the ancients wanted their citizens to be trained in every warlike action.

The most common mistake we make as teachers is attempting to tell our students too much.

I'm so tired, but I can't sleep. Standing on the edge of something much too deep.

I've used drugs that I do consider to be dangerous, drugs that are potentially detrimental to kids and society at large.