Gerhard Richter Quotes

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

I've dedicated a lot of my life as a writer to understanding how to hear the divine voice, or the music of the spheres, or whatever it is that we do when we're making art, making something out of nothing. Figuring out how to do that is much more important than knowing how to execute a good line. I don't think about that anymore, I just write.

If you think about it enough to have a really articulate answer, you're not doing it right. That's how I feel about art. If your thought process could take you to knowing exactly what you're doing and why, there would be no point in making the art. It would become like propaganda. It's more nebulous than that.

Becoming an artist does not merely mean learning something, acquiring professional techniques and methods. Indeed, as someone has said, in order to write well you have to forget the grammar.

I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

Artists need to express.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

I love to create, and to me, the ultimate freedom of expression is a blank canvas or a block of clay to capture whatever emotions your imagination gives it.

Artwork is not like a commercial business; there is no such thing as a schedule for art. You can't hurry art.

I have to go with what the painting says to me. The painting is always informing me. I'm its servant; it's not mine. I'm doing what it wants.

Make good art.

I have a desire to create more film, more beauty, more art, more love, but I don't feel desperate. It's not about creating or building a career.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Every picture has its own demands, and every picture stimulates something within you to tell it a certain way. I don't know what that is; I don't think too much about that.

There is only one true thing: instantly paint what you see. When you've got it, you've got it. When you haven't, you begin again. All the rest is humbug.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

Even if it's a song I know isn't gonna do that well, I'm dropping it as a piece of art, so I always want sick visuals to go with it.

Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.

A lot of cinematography is intuition. It's an art, not a formula.

If you put a blank canvas in front of Matisse and say, 'This has to be a success,' who's going to pick up a paintbrush?

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

I feel mushy these days when I think about art and artists and the work that lies ahead for us. There's good work to be done and there's joy to be found in it, I think.

Once you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don't know whether you're thinking, you just act actually sometimes.