One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.
It is people’s movement that consoles us. If the leaves of a tree did not move, how sad would be the tree – and so should we.
There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.
We were created to look at one another, weren’t we?
Daylight is too easy. What I want is difficult – the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.
Drawing is the artist’s most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.
And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.
The Dance instills in you something that sets you apart. Something heroic and remote.
Drawing is your understanding of form.
Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.
If I were in the government I would have a brigade of policemen assigned to keeping an eye on people who paint landscapes outdoors. Oh, I wouldn’t want anyone killed. I’d be satisfied with just a little buckshot to begin with.
If painting weren’t so difficult, it wouldn’t be fun.
The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.
Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.
What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn’t interest me.
Truth is never ugly when one can find in it what one needs.
Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.
The fascinating thing, is not to show the source of light, but the effect of light.
Only two of my personalities are schizophrenic, but one of them is paranoid and the other one is out to get him. Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
For those who don’t know what they are doing, painting is easy. For those who do know what they are doing, painting is difficult.