If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?
In the end there is only Matisse.
I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for the things – they have to get along with one another.
For my part, I can’t do anything else but what I am doing.
A picture lives by its legend – not by anything else.
I want to get to the stage where nobody can tell how a picture of mine is done. What’s the point of that? Simply that I want nothing but emotion given off by it.
Enough of Art. It’s Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they make art.
The Parthenon is really only a farmyard over which someone put a roof; colonades and sculptures were added because there were people in Athens who happened to be working and wanted to express themselves.
To be young, really young, takes a very long time.
Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the the effect of my work.
To model an object is to possess it.
I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.
If you are trying to find something, it means you haven’t got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it’s false.
Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can’t even imagine in advance.
For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart.
It’s a poor artist who borrows – a good artist steals.
Why assume that to look is to see?
A painting only lives in the eye of the beholder.
Nothing can be done without solitude. I’ve created my own solitude which nobody suspects.
The connoisseur of painting gives only bad advice to the painter. For that reason I have given up trying to judge myself.