Anselm Kiefer

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

I never see a forest that does not bear a mark or a sign of history.

Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.

I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn't what I was after at all.

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

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

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

Ruins, for me, are the beginning. With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.

Art is difficult. It's not entertainment.

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.

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

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.

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

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

I believe art has to take responsibility but it should not give up being art.

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

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.

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

Buying art is not understanding art.

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

I grew up in a forest. It's like a room. It's protected. Like a cathedral... it is a place between heaven and earth.

History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history.

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

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.