Sigmar Polke quotes:

The conventional definition of reality, and the idea of 'normal life', mean nothing.

We were very poor and my family lost everything during the war - our home and our identity. But I'm a believer in luck and think the social conditions you're born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I've been lucky.

I love all dots. I am married to many of them. I want all dots to be happy. Dots are my brothers. I am a dot myself.

Mostly, drawings are things I make for myself - I do them in sketchbooks. They are mental experiments - private inner thoughts when I'm not sure what will come out.

Yes, my works... are enshrined in museums, but I don't care if the pieces fall apart in 20 years.

I began drawing as a very young child and had a grandfather who experimented with photography, so those things constituted my first exposure to art.

Light is a metaphoric thing. There is green light and red light. Then there is black light, which is mostly danger.

I don't see a big difference between painting and photography. Moreover, such distinctions mean nothing to me.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we're both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

People expect things from art that are horrible for us who make it! They put the things we make in these restrictive places called 'museums,' then don't want to hear another word from us.

There has to be an element of risk-taking for me in my work.

It's the procedures in and for themselves that interest me. The picture isn't really necessary.

When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.

When I came to the West, I saw many, many things for the first time. But I also saw the prosperity of the West critically. It wasn't really Heaven.

Picabia is a very old painter who some people try to connect me to, but I refuse such comparisons very well.

A negative is never finished.

As a child, I copied Duerer drawings and Bruegel.

I'm a believer in luck and think the social conditions you're born into provide the opportunity for you to prove your luck. And I suppose I've been lucky.

What interests me is the unforeseeable.