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.
I am always making that what I am not capable, in an attempt to learn how to doing it.
Age only matters when one is aging. Now that I have arrived at a great age, I might as well be twenty.
To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.
It isn't up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.
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.
I don't develop; I am.
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.
To know what you're going to draw, you have to begin drawing.
I am exhausted if I don't work.
You cannot go against nature. She is stronger than the strongest of men. We can permit ourselves some liberties, but in details only.
In art, there is neither past nor future. The art that is not in the present will never be.
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.
As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.
I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes.
Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
If I like it, I say it's mine. If I don't I say it's a fake.
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.
A plagiarist steals from one person. A true artist steals from everybody.
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.
You mustn't expect me to repeat myself. My past doesn't interest me. I would rather copy others than copy myself. In that way I should at least be giving them something new. I love discovering things.
We have learned nothing.
I imitate everyone except myself.
It took me a lifetime.
For those who know how to read, I have painted my autobiography
As an artist, all I need is my paints and brushes - and someone to drag me away when the canvas is done
What a trade! Poor painters! They always wish to be understood, and they are analysed instead.
If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.
Computers are stupid.
Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
For me, there are two kinds of women - goddesses and doormats.
Why assume that to look is to see?
To blossom forth, a work of art must ignore or rather forget all the rules.
Don't waste your youth growing up.
Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.
Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more.
If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three.
Can you imagine me calling myself "Ruiz"? "Pablo Ruiz"? "Diego-José Ruiz"? Or "Juan-Népomucène Ruiz"? I was given I don't know how many names.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.
Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?
To model an object is to possess it.
The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.
The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so may lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon.
For a long time I limited myself to one colour - as a form of discipline.
What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.
The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.
I'm always doing things I can't do. That's how I get to do them.
If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
There's nothing more difficult than a line.
All human beings are born with the same creative potential. Most people squander theirs away on a million superfluous things. I expend mine on one thing and one thing only: my art.
The path to youth takes a lifetime.
Painting isn't made for the decoration of apartments; it is a weapon to be used offensively and defensively against the enemy.
Painting is a jeu d'esprit.
Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.
"Picasso" is of Italian origin, as you know. And the name a person bears or adopts has its importance.
They are not men, they are not women, they are Americans.
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.
If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!
People are always asking me to sign my old canvases. It's ridiculous!
