My last wife [woman-artist Isa Genzken, he married in 1982 - they broke up in 1993] was very competitive, which was hard for both of us. - Gerhard Richter

But somewhere [during the 1950's, in East-Germany at the Art Academy] along the way we all began to notice that there was something wrong. We saw a few art magazines from the West and got a sense of another world. We began to talk about a third way between capitalism and Communism in art. I saw the work of graphic designers from Poland, the only ones [in communist area] I came across who seemed to be doing something for society but in a style that was more modern.

Art is not a substitute religion: it is a religion (in the true sense of the word: 'binding back', 'binding' to the unknowable, transcending reason, transcendent being). But the church is no longer adequate as a means of affording experience of the transcendental, and of making religion real – and so art has been transformed from a means into the sole provider of religion: which means religion itself.

It [grey color] makes no statement whatever.. .It has the capacity that no other color has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).. ..but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.. ..The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color.