I would say for everyday I build buildings or houses like a bricklayer with canvas and paint.

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

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.

Unlike the expressionists, I have never been interested in renewing the world through the vehicle of art.

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.

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

Most of arts what comes from the States to Europe has something to do with entertainment. I can't imagine artists in the United States having the same kind of isolated position that we have here in Europe. I have a feeling one lives more publically in the States.