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

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.

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 idea of changing or improving the world is alien to me and seems ludicrous. Society functions, and always has, without the artist. No artist has ever changed anything for better or worse.

People tend to resist a change into something new and different.But after it's succeded, they easily say that the change is a must.

Beyoncé can handle any record you put in front of her. Any record that pushes her in that direction, it would have been good to be on the project.

The intelligent man is never bored.

Freediving is about silence...the silence that comes from within.

Every step of life shows much caution is required.

Then, again, how annoying to be told it is only five miles to the next place when it is really eight or ten!

What if I am wrong? Any rational investment plan has to start with that question.

Opportunities are always there for us to grow, opportunities are always there for us to come closer to each other & come closer to God; if we just look for them.

America is perhaps best viewed as an 'authoritarian democracy' within its own territory and as 'a global state' of a new kind when considered internationally.

[Taboo] has been exactly the same as working with the BBC in that creatively they do that precious thing which is to only make a comment when a comment needs to be made.