Anselm Kiefer Quotes

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.

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

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

I am of the opinion that there are artists and non-artists. I think that this is the way it always was and always will be. I do not believe that we are in the center of the world. It is possible that there are gods who do not relate to human. As an artist, I believe that it is possible to depict these forces.

Buying art is not understanding art.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 knowledge becomes rigid, it stops living.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Art maybe the only space where an indvidual can be utterly free to question himself, as well as his relationship to his God

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