Cornelius Gurlitt, the 80-year-old recluse in whose Munich apartment authorities discovered a treasure trove of modernist artworks, has said he expects the collection to be returned to him.

In an interview in the new edition of Der Spiegel magazine, Gurlitt said: "I have loved nothing more in my life than my pictures." He added that he hoped the case would be resolved quickly "so I can finally have my pictures back".

"I've never committed a crime, and even if I had, it would fall under the statute of limitations. If I were guilty, they would put me in prison," he said.

In the interview – conducted during a train journey to his heart doctor in a town outside Munich – Gurlitt said he had no intention of co-operating with the authorities, nor would he be willing to donate the paintings to a public museum. "They have it all wrong," he said. "I won't voluntarily give back anything, no, no. The public prosecutor has enough that exonerates me."

The article paints a picture of a man who has lived life largely sheltered from the modern world, and is now perplexed by the attention heaped upon him.

Gurlitt said he had heard about the internet but never used it. He makes hotel reservations by post, and appears to have stopped watching TV around 1963, when Germany's second television channel was introduced. His excursions to the outside world are planned meticulously: before appointments with his doctor he uses index cards to practise answers that will leave a good impression.

Questioned about the media interest in him, he said: "I'm not Boris Becker. What do these people want from me? I'm just a very quiet person. All I wanted to do was live with my pictures. Why are they photographing me for these newspapers, which normally only feature photos of shady characters?"

Gurlitt appears to revere his father, Hildebrand, who was first discriminated against by the Nazis for his "non-Aryan" background but was later commissioned to sell and make money from artworks confiscated by the regime. The younger Gurlitt described him as "courageous" and said "he loved art and fought for it". That some of the artworks in his collection may have been unfairly claimed from Jewish collectors – as the case of Fritz Salo Glaser implies – appeared not to have occured to him.

Gurlitt insisted his father never bought anything from a private individual but only from German museums or art dealers, adding that he only co-operated with the Nazis because he wanted to save the paintings from being burned: "It's possible that my father may have been offered something privately, but he certainly didn't accept it. He would have found that unsavoury."

Gurlitt likened his situation to that of Franz Kafka's In the Penal Colony. In the short story, Kafka's narrator describes a machine that carves a legal verdict into a man's back, eventually killing the accused without him being able to establish what crime he has been found guilty of.