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.

My mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general, if you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.” Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

One starts to get young at the age of sixty and then it is too late.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.

It takes a very long time to become young.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.

I used to draw like Raphael, but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child

You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.

I am always doing things I can’t do, that’s how I get to do them.

Lord, protect me from what I want!

You have to know how to be vulgar. Paint with four-letter words.

The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.

If i wanted to become a monk, I would have ultimately become the Bishop.If i wanted to become a soldier, I would ultimately become the General, but because I wanted to become a painter, i...

He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.

We don’t grow older, we grow riper.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Youth has no age.

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.

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...

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He recopies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the...

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of the birds?

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead I became a painter...

It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don’t care.

I’d like to live like a poor man-only with lots of money.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it means nothing. I do not read English, an English book...

There are painters that can change the sun into a yellow blot, but there are others, that due to their talent and intelligence can change a yellow blot into the sun.

We can see the light but we are still inside the tunnel, … We have not been able to get to all the communities.

I am only a public entertainer who understands his time

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty...

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.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot; others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Now there is fame! Of all — hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public — fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is...

I want to live like a poor man with lots of money.

Taste is the enemy of creativeness

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous.