W. D. Richter Quotes
I don't create blurs. Blurring is not the most important thing; nor is it an identity tag for my pictures.
The usual designation of the magnitude scale to my name does less than justice to the great part that Dr. Gutenberg played in extending the scale to apply to earthquakes in all parts of the world.
Starving the future to feed the present is a mistake - it leads to obsolescence and stagnation. Sometimes it is hard to make this understood.
Nothing is less predictable than the development of an active scientific field.
Innovation and renewal are required to keep a laboratory on the frontiers of science.
Economic freedom has no security without political freedom, and political freedom can find its security only in economic freedom.
Don't wait for extraordinary circumstance to do good; try to use ordinary situations.
As seismologists gained more experience from earthquake records, it became obvious that the problem could not be reduced to a single peak acceleration. In fact, a full frequency of vibrations occurs.
Man's feelings are always purest and most glowing in the hour of meeting and of farewell.
In 1948 I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, undecided between studies of chemistry and physics, but my first year convinced me that physics was more interesting to me.
Most fans go wild when they see a goalie make what looks like a great save, but the chances are what they are seeing is a save that was made from being out of position.
It is a danger to wait around for an idea to occur to you. You have to find the idea.
The rose does not bloom without thorns. True, but would that the thorns did not outlive the rose.
A lot of different things had to come together over the years, accumulated experiences of a general and personal nature, before the idea and the decision were developed and then carried out.
I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)
I'm obsessed with low end, its kind of my religion. In a way it has given me a chance to explore more than I have in any other project.
I've always written at night - my working day for years was around 9pm to 2am - though I do keep more regular hours these days.
I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy.
Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.
Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.
My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation.
Tell me what you want, and then I'll put in what I want... after I'm done with my codependent providing for you, I'll get a little for me too.
Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.
You're really playing against yourself. You have to learn what you can control and what you can't, and not let what you can't control affect your confidence.
Family photos, pictures of groups, those are truely wonderful. And they are just as good as the old masters, just as rich and just as beautifully composed (what does that mean anyway).
If one introduces the concept of energy of an earthquake then that is a theoretically derived quantity.
How could one be in this world without feeling dismayed by it? Even if one paints flowers and gingerbread.
I don't believe in the reality of painting, so I use different styles like clothes: it's a way to disguise myself.
The year is always correct, also the month, only the day can be another. But that occurs to me only in the moment of writing it down.
When I make a representation of something, this, too, is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it.
Art shows us how to see things that are constructive and good, and to be an active part of that.
I choose depending on the way I feel; randomly, in other words. When I haven't done anything for a long time, I always start small, on paper.
The Atlas belongs to the Lenbachhaus in Munich - it's long since ceased to belong to me. Occasionally I run across it somewhere, and I think it's interesting because it looks different each time.
With a brush you have control. The paint goes on the brush and you make the mark. From experience you know exactly what will happen. With the squeegee you lose control.
Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings.
Everything has a reason, including the selection of the photos, which was not arbitrary but appropriate to the period, its highs and lows and my sense of them.
