Gerhard Richter Quotes

For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make.

It's hard to make great art when you've got too much pressure.

I can't bear to finish things, beyond a certain point they get heavy. There's something so dead about a finished painting.

I wrote 'Criminal' in 45 minutes when everyone else went to lunch because I had to have a hit. I can force myself to do the work, but only if someone is right up behind me.

Everybody knows that I don't have a muse. I'm not interested in that.

I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

I'm not very prolific. I'm not good at sitting down as an artist and saying 'Okay, I need to put in my four hours today.'

For Scary Movie 2, we had a due date and had to work fast. And though there's a lot of pressure, as artists, we just block it out. So really, the pressure comes from us. That's how the first movie happened. There was no outside pressure: we wanted to hit the audience hard.

There's one thing now that I experience every day when I'm making a film. I get up and think to myself, 'Am I going to be able to do it today?' I figure as long as I have that fear, I'll be alright.

My struggle over the years has constantly been, it only takes 10 minutes, or an average shower, to come up with a mini-series or two, but it takes a year to draw them. So for me, it's been just trying to find a way to get all these ideas and all these incidents on paper.

I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.

Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.

I'm doing one of three things: I'm writing. I'm staring out the window. Or I'm writhing on the floor.

Katagiri Roshi says: "Poor artists. They suffer very much. They finish a masterpiece and they are not satisfied. They want to go on and do another." Yes, but it's better to go on and do another if you have the urge than to start drinking and become alcoholic or eat a pound of good fudge and get fat.

You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint.

Don't think about making art, just get it done.

When I have just sat down and tried to write the lyrics of a song, usually about half of it sounds like bullshit. I just have to go away from something and come back to it again later. I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

An author who waits for the right 'mood' will soon find that 'moods' get fewer and fewer until they cease altogether.

Art is a war - between ourselves and the forces of self-sabotage that would stop us from doing our work. The artist is a warrior.

Inspiration and creativity, they ride right next to one anotherNot everyday are you going to wake up, the clouds are gonna part and the rays are gonna come downsometimes you gotta just get in there and force yourself to work and maybe something good will come out of it.

I'm still afflicted with the malady of research. I don't like what I do, and I paint it out, and paint it out again. I hope this mania will come to an end... I'm like a child at school. The white page must always be evenly written and slap! bang! and there's a blot! I'm still blotting and I'm forty years old.

I spent my entire youth writing slowly with revisions and endless rehashing speculation and deleting and got so I was writing one sentence a day and the sentence had no FEELING. Goddamn it, FEELING is what I like in art, not CRAFTINESS and the hiding of feelings.

Just as a painter needs light in order to put the finishing touches to his picture, so I need an inner light, which I feel I never have enough of in the autumn.

Telling yourself you have all the time in the world, all the colors in the palette, that just kills creativity.