I work with few colors, what creates the illusion of quantity is that they fell in the right place.
Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.
Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.
...the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given.... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order.... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.
For me, there are two kinds of women - goddesses and doormats.
Painting isn't made for the decoration of apartments; it is a weapon to be used offensively and defensively against the enemy.
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
All things considered, there is only Matisse.
I draw like other people bite their nails.
It takes a long time to become young.
What I want is that my picture should evoke nothing but emotion.
We now know that Art is not the truth... but rather a way of approaching the truth.
I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for the things - they have to get along with one another.
What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements.
Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.
The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves.
I imitate everyone except myself.
Don't waste your youth growing up.
To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.
For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography
If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.
No doubt, it is useful for an artist to know all the forms of art which have preceded or which accompany his. That is a sign of strength if it is a question of looking for a stimulus or recognizing mistakes he must avoid.
When I work I relax; doing nothing or entertaining visitors makes me tired.
If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the good in doingit?
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
I do things I don't know how to do in order to learn how to do them.
When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.
People don't realize what they have when they own a picture by me. Each picture is a phial with my blood. That is what has gone into it.
...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.
When I am told I am too old to do something, I try to do it right away.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!
The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.
If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
Two of the most frustrated trades are dentists and photographers - dentists because they want to be doctors, and photographers because they want to be painters.
The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.
The important thing is to create. Nothing else matters; creation is all.
The purpose of Art is to create enthusiasm.
It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.
I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.
In life you throw a ball. You hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope your friends will provide that wall.
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
Art is lies that tell the truth.
Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.
Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.
If everybody is looking for it, then nobody is finding it. If we were cultured, we would not be conscious of lacking culture. We would regard it as something natural and would not make so much fuss about it. And if we knew the real value of this word we would be cultured enough not to give it so much importance.
I see for others... in order to put on canvas the sudden apparitions which come to me.
How could Michelangelo have seen his David in a block of marble? Man began to make images only because he discovered them nearly formed around him, already within reach. He saw them in a bone, in the bumps of a cave, in a piece of wood. One form suggested a woman to him, another a buffalo, still another the head of a monster.
What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he's a painter, or ears if he's a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he's a poet, or even, if he's a boxer, just his muscles? On the contrary, he's at the same time a political being, constantly alive to heart-rending, burning, or happy events in the world.
If I paint a hammer and sickle people may think it is a representation of Communism, but for me it is only a hammer and sickle. I just want to reproduce the objects for what they are, not for what they mean.
Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.
The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
One cannot be a sorcerer all the time. How could one live?
