I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting … - Gerhard Richter

But my motivation was more a matter of wanting to create order – to keep track of things. All those boxes full of photographs and sketches weigh you down, because they have something unfinished, incomplete, about them. So it's better to present the usable material in an orderly fashion and throw the other stuff away. That's how the Atlas came to be, and I exhibited it a few times.

I can bear this - that I am not the young wild guy [as he was in the 1970's]. I hope that the lust to work doesn't leave me. That would be sad. I am glad to get honors and high prices. But artists are valued today in terms of money, auctions. I wish society would need art more, but it doesn't. So I feel very lonely in this culture.

I was enormously impressed by Jackson Pollock and Lucio Fontana.. ..the sheer brazenness of it! That really fascinated me and impressed me. I might almost say that those paintings were the real reason I left the GDR [ German Democratic Republic ]. I realized that something was wrong with my whole way of thinking.. .I lived my life with a group of people who laid claim to a moral aspiration, who wanted to bridge a gap.. .And so the way we thought, and what we wanted for our own art, was all about compromise.