Quotes from Gerhard Richter

I go to the studio every day, but I dont paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things.

I'm still very sure that painting is one of the most basic human capacities, like dancing and singing, that make sense, that stay with us, as something human.

When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there's a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it.

When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war.

Good art in general aspires to something, as a good painting aspires to something, almost spiritual or holy.

To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.

I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false

Art is the highest form of hope.

I blur things to make everything equally important and equally unimportant. I blur things so that they do not look artistic or craftsmanlike but technological, smooth and perfect. I blur things to make all the parts a closer fit. Perhaps I also blur out the excess of unimportant information.

My paintings are wiser than I am.

It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable. We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty. But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.

I have become involved with thinking and acting without the help of an ideology; I have nothing that helps me, no idea that I serve and am known for . . . no rules that regulate the how, no belief that gives me direction, no picture of the future, no instruction that produces an overly ordered mind. I acknowledge only what is and, accordingly, regard every description and configuration of that which we don't know as madness. Ideologues seduce and exploit uncertainty, legitimize war.

I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.

My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.

Painting pictures is simply the official, the daily work, the profession, and in the case of the watercolours I can sooner afford to follow my mood, my spirits.

A father draws boundaries and calls a halt, whenever necessary. As I didn't have that, I was able to stay childishly naive that much longer - so I did what I liked, because there was nobody stopping me, even when I got it wrong.

Without form, communication stops... without form, you have everybody burbling on to themselves, whenever and however, things that no one else can understand and - rightly - no one else is interested in.

I am ridiculously old-fashioned.

I have always been structured. What has changed is the proportions. Now it is eight hours of paperwork and one of painting.

Every museum is full of nice things. That's the opposite of before. It was important things or serious things. Now we have interesting things.

Chance determines our lives in important ways.

I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.

Art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that.

The year is always correct, also the month, only the day can be another. But that occurs to me only in the moment of writing it down.