Anselm Kiefer

Buying art is not understanding art.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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