I started collecting my artist friends, artists like myself who nobody had yet noticed. In everything, all I am collecting, so to speak, are my friends - artist friends.

An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object.

What I could never escape was Germany, and being German.

A painter doesn't need any talent. In fact, it's better not to have it.

I love my old paintings as postulates as fresh starting points but I have to destroy them. I have to make a new manifesto.

When Michael Werner saw a painting of mine, such as Die grosse Nacht im Eimer, which back then nobody wanted and everybody thought was ridiculous, he realized that this was the right provocation, that it represented the feeling of the times in the right way.

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.