“Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?”
“Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.”
“Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them!”
“If I like it, I say it's mine. If I don't I say it's a fake.”
“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.”
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.”
“If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.”
“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.”
“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.”
“What I find horrible nowadays is that people are always trying to find a personality for themselves. Nobody bothers about what you might call a painter's ideal... the kind that's always existed... No. They couldn't care less about that.”
“I would like to manage to prevent people from ever seeing how a picture of mine has been done. What can it possibly matter? What I want is that the only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.”
“I don't work from nature, I work like nature.”
“And fame, for a painter means sales, gains, fortune, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated. I am rich.”
“Those who attempts to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time.”
“Reality is to be found in lightness and darkness.”
“For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography”
“The more technique there is, the less there is”
“What other movement determines the S line? Its aesthetic efficacity has long been noted by artists.”
“Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it's true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That's what's important.”
“The chief enemy of creativity is 'good' sense.”
“Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.”
“When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.”
“It is a well-known fact that we see the faults in other's works more readily than we do in our own.”
“One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late.”
“We now know that Art is not the truth... but rather a way of approaching the truth.”
