Gerhard Richter Quotes

I am about as detailed as a shadow.

Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way. It's not that it's so difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about.

I spend a substantial amount of my time endeavoring to fend off questions, and worry terribly that I might end up being too clear.

Never be lucid, never state, if you would be regarded great.

If I turn out to be particularly clear, you've probably misunderstood what I've said.

I strive to be brief but I become obscure.

I seem to be able to just sort of sink and slide under the radar, which is nice.

In labouring to be concise, I become obscure.

I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.

Be obscure clearly.

It is often my nature to be abstract, hidden in plain sight, or nowhere at all.

When you are trying to impress people with words, the more you say, the more common you appear, and the less in control. Even if you are saying something banal, it will seem original if you make it vague, open-ended, and sphinxlike.

That's the one thing I don't like hearing, when someone says, 'We'll see what happens, see what happens here, see what happens there.' Forget all of that.

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'

Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make 'nothing' visible.

Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague.

In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because--I don't know why.

I like residing in abstraction.

Oh, I don't know, you know, don't you know?

To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.

In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon- The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of thing that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be.

Subtlety chases the obvious up a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it.

You should avoid making yourself too clear even in your explanations.

Some consider the puzzles that are created by their omissions as spicy challenges, without which their texts would be boring; others shun clarity lest their work is considered trivial.

Aiming at brevity, I become obscure.