Gerhard Richter Quotes

It turns out that my memory is just not that great, so for specific scenes with people doing stuff, sometimes I'd have the details all wrong or I couldn't remember what happened exactly, so I just let that be.

Sometimes you remember more about the location where you shot the film than the film itself.

People talk from memory and memory often plays false.

In the experience of art, time seems not to exist. When I'm writing and think, "I've been working for two hours," I've actually been working for seven.

Yesterday was Chinese New Year. It's the Year of the Rabbit. And here's how dumb I am. I'm still writing the Year of the Pig on my checks.

One's relationship to time is complicated, and sometimes a day will drag on forever and sometimes it'll be over in a flash. When you look back, "I'm old," after 40 or 60 years, I can't believe I'm as old as I am.

I think time is elastic. There are moments in my life that are many, many years ago and yet I can conjure them as though it's a second ago. And there are other things that happened maybe last week that seem like ages ago.

Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.

Two seconds are a thousand years.

Almost 70 years have gone by, and I've still got that feeling when I write... Writing, for me, is still it. It has always been the basis of everything I do. I'm a writer who performs, not a performer who writes. I love the act of writing. It's still a thrill for me.

How long have I been here, what a question, I've often wondered. And often I could answer, An hour, a month, a year, a century, depending on what I meant by here, and me, and being, and there I never went looking for extravagant meanings, there I never much varied, only the here would sometimes seem to vary.

It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be constantly before us. A year impairs, a luster obliterates. There is little distinct left without an effort of memory, then indeed the lights are rekindled for a moment - but who can be sure that the Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

People forget years and remember moments.

It's kind of alarming for me to realize that, when I'm writing stories about times I remember, it's already historical fiction.

People may correctly remember the events of twenty years ago (a remarkable feat), but who remembers his fears, his disgusts, his tone of voice? It is like trying to bring back the weather of that time.

Time plays like an accordion in the way it can stretch out and compress itself in a thousand melodic ways. Months on end may pass blindingly in a quick series of chords, open-shut, together-apart; and then a single melancholy week may seem like a year's pining, one long unfolding note.

The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

There was once a Hindu sage, who sat down on the banks of the Ganges and thought for seventy years about the millennium. Just as he arrived at the solution and was putting it into verse, a mosquito stung him and he forgot it again at once.

For years I've wanted to work with this guy, so to actually write at the top of my scripts "Empress, Script by Mark Millar, Art by Stuart Immonen" is an absolute pleasure.

My tunes and numbers are here. They have filled my years, the years when I refused to die. And in order to do that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote, at noon or 3:00 A.M. So as not to be dead.

There is nothing that one can say about acting, writing, producing or directing that cannot be revoked in the next breath. Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.

Four years ago... no, it was yesterday.

If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up.

All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

The art of fiction is freedom of will for your characters.