Gerhard Richter Quotes

I'm really interested in the nondefinitive element of abstraction.

Silence is a universal language. It's like music or painting.

I'm huge on visuals. I love visuals.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

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.

Art is a line around your thoughts.

Drawing is the honesty of the art.

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it’s one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act.

But of works of art little can be said.

Praises reap not! Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more.

There was no despondency when she fell asleep that night; nor was there hope when she awoke in the morning.

You know, I think the people I feel saddest for are the ones who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder, who felt their emotions floating away and just didn't care. I guess that's what's scariest: not caring about the loss.

Depressive lucidity, usually described as a radical withdrawal from ordinary human concerns, generally manifests itself by a profound indifference to things which are genuinely of minor interest. Thus it is possible to imagine a depressed lover, while the idea of a depressed patriot seems frankly inconceivable.

Create, artist, do not talk.

April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.

A man's vanity is more fragile that you might think. It's easy for us to mistake shyness for coldness, and silence for indifference.

Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.

Head's all empty, I don't care,' he'd sing to me, quoting the Grateful Dead, and I'd force a smile, thinking that my head was never empty and that if it ever was, you could be darn sure I'd care.

It's all the same for me, how I teach, how I write, how I think.

Oh, I think it's definitely spiritual. All music is. I think it's maybe one of the highest forms of spirituality.

There are situations in which hope and fear run together, in which they mutually destroy one another and lose themselves in dull indifference.