"M.C. Escher The Official Website"

“Escher and the Droste effect”

“I first made this one endlessness. It is also meant as a reaction against sculptors. I see them as a little inferior - no, that is not well-expressed – but sculptors are too limited. They see sculpturing as something superior, but everybody can do modeling. Drawing is much more difficult, much more immaterial.”

“..and to think now that great mathematicians find my work interesting because I am able to illustrate their theories. They can not imagine that I was such a bad pupil in mathematics. I don't understand it myself neither. I never could understand why it was necessary to prove something that everyone already sees. I saw it, I knew it, so it is how it is… But yes, you had to prove it. I did overcome it when I realized I can make something else - I thought I was a good-for-nothing. In my family there were no other artists to find.. .I was just a weird duck, right?”

“The unknown mountain nests in the inhospitable interior of southern Calabria are usually connected only by a mule track with the railway that runs close to the coast: whoever wants to go there has to walk on foot if he has no donkey at his disposal. I think back to that warm afternoon in the month of May when we the four of us, after a long, tiring ride in the harsh sun, packed with the heavy burden of our backpacks, sweat-dripping and a little gasping, entered the city gate of Palizzi..”

“When someone forgets himself, this by no means makes him altruistic; when a thinking person forgets himself, he immediately also forgets his fellowman, he loses himself and his humanity by becoming engrossed in his subject. Thus he is in a sense more contemplative than a feeling person.”

“But to get back to the point: did you ever imagine that your dad, who lives so far away from the bustle and intrigue of the world, working on his prints day after day like a hermit, would some day be drawn into the sickening scene of vain officialdom, despite himself?.. .But what on earth can I do about it? Luckily I can swear by God and all his angels that I never moved a finger to get the decoration or licked the boots of any bigwigs.”