We live in a rainbow of chaos.

A new gadget that lasts only five minutes is worth more than an immortal work that bores everyone.

You say a new era in art is preparing; you sensed it coming; continue your studies without weakening. God will do the rest.

Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.

My arse contemplates those who talk behind my back.

I allow no one to touch me.

There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.

If isolation tempers the strong, it is the stumbling-block of the uncertain.

A free spirit takes liberties even with liberty itself.

With a painter’s temperament, all that’s needed are the means of expression sufficient to be intelligible to the wide public.

People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

Two sittings a day of my models and I’m totally exhausted.

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.

Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?

Pain has its reasons, pleasure is totally indifferent.

We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity.

I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion.

I am a pupil of Pissarro.

I have tried to do what is true and not ideal.

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

Is it the factitious and the conventional that most surely succeed on earth and in the course of life?

Between my head and my hand, there is always the face of death.

A puny body weakens the soul.

Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones.

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism.

Love is when the desire to be desired takes you so badly that you feel you could die of it.

I have sworn to die painting.

It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.

The essence of a man is found in his faults.

A thousand painters ought to be killed yearly. Say what you like: I’m every inch a painter.

Tell me, do you think I’m going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

I have nothing to hide in art. The initial force alone can bring anyone to the end he must attain.

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Of course one should not drink much, but often.

It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.

If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.

An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all.

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.

I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

Thought is made in the mouth.

I paint things as they are. I don’t comment.