I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

I grew up in a forest. It's like a room. It's protected. Like a cathedral... it is a place between heaven and earth.

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things - the skill and technique - will follow.

I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn't what I was after at all.

Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.

When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.