Much bending breaks the bow; much unbending the mind.
All painting is an accident. But it’s also not an accident, because one must select what part of the accident one chooses to preserve.
It’s such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.
If you can talk about it, why paint it?
I think I tend to destroy the better paintings, or those that have been better to a certain extent. I try and take them further, and they lose all their qualities, and they lose everything. I think I would say that I destroy all the better paintings.
I like, you may say, the glitter and colour that comes from the mouth, and I’ve always hoped in a sense to be able to paint the mouth like Monet painted a sunset.
Of all things known to mortals wine is the most powerful and effectual for exciting and inflaming the passions of mankind, being common fuel to them all.
Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down.
I believe in deeply ordered chaos.
Habit, if wisely and skillfully formed, becomes truly a second nature; but unskillfully and unmethodically depicted, it will be as it were an ape of nature, which imitates nothing to the life, but only clumsily and awkwardly.
Boldness is a child of ignorance.
The wonder of a single snowflake outweighs the wisdom of a million meteorologists.
A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.
A man finds himself seven years older the day after his marriage.
Spouses are great impediments to great enterprises.
Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people’s plates.
In things that are tender and unpleasing, it is good to break the ice by some one whose words are of less weight, and to reserve the more weighty voice to come in as by chance.
There is no great concurrence between learning and wisdom.
When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.
The pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of Job than the felicities of Solomon.