Gerhard Richter Quotations | Page 2

I don't dare to think my paintings are great. I can't understand the arrogance of someone saying, 'I have created a big, important work.'

It's our culture, Christian history, that's what formed me. Even as an atheist, I believe. We're just built that way.

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.

I believe in painting and I believe in eating too. What can we do? We have to eat, we have to paint, we have to live. Of course, there are different ways to survive. But it's my best option.

I have no time for specialized concerns, working themes or variations that lead to mastery... I like the indefinite, the boundless; I like continual uncertainty. Other qualities may be more conducive to achievement, publicity, success; but they are all outworn - as outworn as ideologies, opinions, concepts and names for things.

Painting is my profession, because it has always been the thing that interested me most. I'm of a certain age, I come from a different tradition and, in any case, I can't do anything else. 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.

I don't how I can describe the quality that is only found in art (be it music, literature, painting, or whatever), this quality, it's just there, and it endures.

Art is the ideal medium for making contact with the transcendental, or at least for getting close to it.

I often need a long time to understand things, to imagine a painting I might make.

The painter sees the semblance of things and repeats it. That is, without fabricating the things himself, he fabricates their semblance; and, if that no longer recalls any object, this artificially produced semblance functions only because it is scrutinized for likeness to a familiar - that is, object-related - semblance.