Gerhard Richter Quotes

I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

I want paint to work as flesh.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

I never draw except with brush and paint.

Each brushstroke is a decision.

When I am painting I have a general notion as to what I am about. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

I always like the studio best, once I got the hang of it and the control. I like it because it's complete control

What you do when you paint, you take a brush full of paint, get paint on the picture, and you have faith.

As an actor you don't control the end result. Because you're a director, you get to control the end result. I think for us, we really have to show up and participate and give. And then let go.

As a writer you're holding a dog. You let the dog run about. But you finally can pull him back. Finally, I'm in control. But the great excitement is to see what happens if you let the whole thing go. And the dog or the character really runs about, bites everyone in sight, jumps up trees, falls into lakes, gets wet, and you let that happen. That's the excitement of writing plays-to allow the thing to be free but still hold the final leash.

When I'm making my music, I'm writing it, I'm producing it, I'm playing all the instruments, I'm performing. It's my own world where I do what I feel, and nobody tells me anything.

My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.

Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.

When you write a novel or paint a picture, you have the opportunity to approach it and back off, tear up pages, write, rewrite, paint over, and come back to it. In film, once you start shooting, you can't restart the clock, and you keep moving forward, and you don't look back, and you don't go back. And that is, of course, antithetical to the creative process. It's really hard to generate a comfortable creative flow under that kind of pressure.

Even if you need, and want, a second opinion, it can be dangerous to have people telling you what they think you ought to add, or cut, before you've even finished telling your story. One loses heart; one loses energy and interest. Or at least I do.

Sometimes what happens is that, when you micromanage actors and moments, it just doesn't quite live.

One paints with one's head, not one's hand.

When I make records I have full control of everything and I know how it sounds before it comes out, with films it's outta my hands.

Getting to share a project with Anthony Hopkins is incredible. It's like watching Da Vinci paint or something - you're reminded why you do what you do.

To me, the whole process of being a brush stroke in someone else's painting is a little difficult

Of course it's super special to create your own records; it really is a part of my self.

The worst thing you can do to anybody trying to be creative is to demand participation in their vision.

I paint with my back to the world