I've painted, but I've also done graphics since as long as I can remember. So even people with little to spend could afford it. But even the graphic works are only bought by those who buy the big, expensive paintings. I think that's troublesome.

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 did not always trust my teachers, because I found them too weak. I was looking for something that could take me in a new direction, for things that I could admire. And because it was so hard to find this, I became a sort of outsider. That's why I began to identify with the insane, "outsider" artists.

I became an artist because of the possibility it gave me to develop in another way, because I didn't want to follow the same lines the others around me did. I was educated in the former German Democratic Republic, which meant that an individual figure had to be... like a soldier in the army.

I don't see art as entertainment.

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