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

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

I have always had the feeling that other people are too stupid to discover interesting things. That's why I do it myself. I think of collecting as a way to show that I understand what's important better than others do.

In a place like the Guggenheim, I would like to be a representative of arte povera. This would be my ideal.

There's a market for art, and things are indeed going swimmingly, especially for German artists. But everything takes place in America and in London, where there are quite a few wealthy, engaged people. What motivates them to buy art is a different question, but they do.

I do not have a philosophy about retrospectives. Of course, I cannot change what I have done. What I am doing today, this I can change, in view of whatever I have done before. My retrospectives are like a series of ghosts.

Nowhere in my collection do I, say, have a Auguste Renoir painting. Because everybody knows that this is a good painter without me having to demonstrate it.