I can't paint as well as Vermeer.

I go to the studio every day, but I don't paint every day. I love playing with my architectural models. I love making plans. I could spend my life arranging things.

Art should be serious, not a joke. I don't like to laugh about art.

I don't believe in God.

Chance determines our lives in important ways.

I want pictorial content without sentiment, but I want it as human as possible.

Maybe we didn’t even have a chance. The message of American Pop Art was so powerful and so optimistic. But it was also very limited, and that led us to believe that we could somehow distance ourselves from it and communicate a different intention.

I don’t know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the ‘essential dimension,’ the thing that makes great works of art great.

The Atlas belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich – it’s long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it’s interesting because it looks different each time.

In truth, factual information – names or dates – have never interested me much. Those things are like an alien language that can interfere with the language of the painting, or even prevent its emergence.