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

The reality is the picture, it is most certainly not in the picture.

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.

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.

I paint German artists whom I admire. I paint their pictures, their work as painters, and their portraits too. But oddly enough, each of these portraits ends up as a picture of a woman with blonde hair. I myself have never been able to work out why this happens.

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

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