You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.

When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in...

Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some...

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?

The older you get the stronger the wind gets – and it’s always in your face.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.

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.

It takes a long time to become young.

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

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

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Youth has no age.

If there were only one truth, you couldn’t paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

Disciples be damned. It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.

We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

My mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

Accidents, try to change them it’s impossible. The accidental reveals man.

The chief enemy of creativity is “good” sense.

The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

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

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.

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

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the...

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

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.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

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.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!

We don’t grow older, we grow riper.

I do not seek. I find.