If I do something that depresses, it's not because I'm depressed, but because political life and history are depressing.

Because of my Calvinistic upbringing, I was trained to think that what you do has to have a purpose.

The reason for this project comes from my childhood, that is clear to me. I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment.

I am interested in reconstructing symbols. It's about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.

When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.

I am against the idea of the end, that everything culminates in paradise or judgment.

But we should also not forget the difference between what first motivated me and the work that is the result.

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

As a child I had no toys; our house was bombed, but there were lots of bricks. Ruins are wonderful because they are the beginning of something new, you can do something with them.

Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.

I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.

Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.

When I see a new artist I give myself a lot of time to reflect and decide whether it's art or not.

Buying art is not understanding art.

I believe in empty spaces; they're the most wonderful thing.

Not content, but the road the artist takes, is the interesting part.

What does the artist do? He draws connections. He ties the invisible threads between things. He dives into history, be it the history of mankind, the geological history of the Earth or the beginning and end of the manifest cosmos.

As an artist you have to find something that deeply interests you. It's not enough to make art that is about art, to look at Matisse and Picasso and say, how can I paint like them? You have to be obsessed by something that can't come out in any other way, then the other things -- the skill and technique -- will follow.

History speaks to artists. It changes the artist's thinking and is constantly reshaping it into different and unexpected images.