An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.
When you're really young, you're young for life.
For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.
Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.
The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.
A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder
It's always necessary to seek for perfection. Obviously, for us, this word no longer has the same meaning. To me, it means: from one canvas to the next, always go further, further.
Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It's not interesting.
That inspiration comes, does not depend on me. The only thing I can do is make sure it catches me working.
Good designers copy; great designers steal.
All Children are Artists
You see these thick curtains shut out the daylight: artificial light suits me a great deal better; it's absolutely steady, and much more exciting.
When there's dust missing here or there, it's because someone has touched my things. I see immediately someone has been there. And it's because I live constantly with dust, in dust, that I prefer to wear gray suits, the only color on which it leaves no trace.
Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision, the same technique, the same formula during years and years, sometimes during one's whole lifetime.
What do you think an artist is? ...he is a political being, constantly aware of the heart breaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.
When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.
When you are young and without success, you have only a few friends. Then, later on, when you are rich and famous, you still have a few... if you are lucky.
Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.
By amusing myself with all these games, all this nonsense, all these picture puzzles, I became famous... I am only a public entertainer who has understood his time.
To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.
I'm always doing things I can't do. That's how I get to do them.
As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes - and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done
My friends back in Barcelona called me by that name (Picasso). It was stranger, more resonant, than "Ruiz." And those are probably the reasons I adopted it. Do you know what appealed to me about that name? Well, it was undoubtedly the double s, which is fairly unusual in Spain.
The more technique there is, the less there is
If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
A good picture, any picture, has to be bristling with razor blades.
When I haven't any blue I use red.
We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only.
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.
I have had no true friends, only lovers.
Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
To model an object is to possess it.
If you take my sayings and explode them in the air, they remain only sayings. But if you fit them together in their correct places, you will have the whole story.
I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics.
I'm not a developer; I am.
Love must be proven by facts and not by reasons.
A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.
I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.
To be young, really young, takes a very long time.
How often have I found that wanting to use blue, I didn't have it so I used a red instead of the blue.
The revolutionary artist does not only focus on the negative aspects of capitalist lives, but also creates visions of a revolutionary future.
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.
I simply painted images of what was before my eyes; it is for others to find hidden meaning in them.
I've reached the moment where the movement of my thought interests me more than the thought itself.
When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.
What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead.
If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.
What other movement determines the S line? Its aesthetic efficacity has long been noted by artists.
If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn't tell you.
In art, practice always comes before theory.
I do not seek. I find.
Computers are useless - all they can give you are answers.
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false.
When German soldiers used to come to my studio and look at my pictures of Guernica, they'd ask 'Did you do this?'. And I'd say, 'No, you did.'
