Gerhard Richter Quotes

I am only interested in painting the actual person, in doing a painting of them, not in using them to some ulterior end of art. For me, to use someone doing something not native to them would be wrong.

I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out the real world.

I think that's always the hope - I mean, I can't speak for others, but I think other artists, no matter what type of medium they are using - whether it be from painting to acting to dancing, songwriting, or anything like that - I believe the desire is to get to the truth, and I think it's really hard to tell the truth.

An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.

I'm not just painting for painting's sake. I want to be truthful.

I never think about my style but just try and make the pictures look believable.

There are two ways to worry words. One is hoping for the greatest possible beauty in what is created. The other is to tell the truth.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.

If I go into a studio and find my truth of the moment, there are a number of people in the world who can relate to what I'm saying and are going to buy into what I'm doing. Not because it's the new thing of the moment, but because it's genuine emotion. Its how I feel. This is how I articulate the world.

I'm not trying to feed off of a concept that another artist had - that's not what I do.

What sometimes annoys me about the arts is increasingly that we have to put real people on screen or stage.

Film has to reflect the real world.

I don't like post-modernism. It's cynical, and takes no discipline - you just copy. It doesn't allow a film to be open to reality.

There is a very thin line dividing characterisation from impersonation. I've to make sure I don't cross over into mimicry.

If you can depict situations and explore life in a truthful way and explore areas of grey - because that's where the truth lives - and you can do that in an objective way and allow people to take from that what they will, I think it's a satisfying sweet spot with storytelling.

My process of songwriting comes from a very real place: a place that when you watch 'American Idol' - God bless it, it's probably an awesome experience that these people are having, but it's not a real one.

If you get to participate with a group of artists and make something that's really truthful, that's about the highest you can go, in my opinion.

My thing is to try to tell the truth as honestly as possible. For me, the weight is, how can I tell the truth through fiction, the best that I can?

I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell it to you.

I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

It's good to be employable, but I hope to show the truth. The paintings seem true because nobody wants me to do them.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

I made my song a coat Covered with embroideries Out of old mythologies From heel to throat But the fools caught it, Wore it in the world's eyes As though they'd wrought it. Song, let them take it, For there's more enterprise In walking naked.

Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Verisimilitude is merely an illusion.