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

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.

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

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

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.

History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.

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