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.

Because of my Calvinistic upbringing, I was trained to think that what you do has to have a purpose.

Not content, but the road the artist takes, is the interesting part.

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.

Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.

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

History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.