Gerhard Richter Quotes

But one of the things I learned from improvising is that all of life is an improvisation, whether you like it or not. Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century came out of people dropping things.

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

If you don't have a plan, you can end up doing some interesting things.

Chance is another name that we give to our mistakes. And all of the best things in my films are mistakes.

Chance is the nature of our universe. [...] madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be valuable.

Sometimes my mistakes turn into interesting music because I do things that aren't supposed to be done.

The great fun of doing new plays is that people have no idea what's going to happen next. That goes quite soon, as people start talking about it, and the only way you can keep hold of that is genuinely to keep changing it.

I have this theory that I hold on to, the theory that everything great in art and in life in general is jazz. It's just like all these things that just kind of seem to fall into place. You know, like mistakes that somehow turn into something beautiful.

An actor can never plan. You never know what can work in your favour or not and then maybe the whole dynamics can change.

I am always living in the now, so I like what fate brings to you. That's always fun for me. To have a process and someone be like, 'How about this?' And you just grab onto that and see where it takes you.

I often don't know what I'll be working on next year or a year from now. There is often a chance meeting, or something that I worked on 10 years ago suddenly becomes important again.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

But chance runs like a river through all our lives, and being prepared for surprise is the best we can do.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

In improvisation, there are no mistakes.

I've worked with collage a lot. And there's this chance thing that happens - you don't always control things. Why did you find this today and not this? But you've got this thing, and you make it work. It's the way life is, I suppose. Whatever happens, you deal with it.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.

Error itself may be happy chance.

All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control - to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children's cartoons or utopian novels. But it's just a fantasy.

Some people are very lucky, and have the story in their heads. I've never storyboarded anything. I like the idea of chance. What makes God laugh is people who make plans.

I consider projects very deeply, but there's always a point in your life where there's a bit of randomity.

In my work, I have never had any use for anything that I have known in advance.

Innovation is serendipity, so you don't know what people will make.

We have the script, we have the actors, and we're trying to figure out what this is, and you don't know what it is. You have to be open to what it's going to become rather than have this thing that you're trying to get to, which is boring.