A citizen sticks to conventions, does whatever is social. Artists, of course, must reject all conventions. I see no differently in reconciling the best of both of these worlds.

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

As a human being, I am a citizen, but as an artist, I am asocial.

That was in 1957. And there I found out that Germany is a kind of province. I didn't know anything about expressionism, about the Bauhaus and Dada and surrealism. I was uneducated, so to speak - and everybody else was more or less uneducated, too.

I don't see art as entertainment.

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

What counts most is finding new ways to get the world down in paint on my own terms.