I want to be famous but unknown!
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.
Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.
No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn’t painting be too?
You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.
Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.
It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one’s memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
One must have a high opinion of a work of art – not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.
Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance.
The true traveler never arrives.
Taste! It doesn’t exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.
A picture is an artificial work, outside nature. It calls for as much cunning as the commission of a crime.
You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there’s no point in working.
What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it’s charming.
In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.
What a horrible thing yellow is.