To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.
The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.
I draw like other people bite their nails.
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 coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that particular peach is but a detail.
They’ll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particular green, never.
Disciples be damned. It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
The painter goes through states of fullness and evaluation. That is the whole secret of art.
When I am finished painting, I paint again for relaxation.
When I enter the studio, I leave my body at the door the way the Moslems leave their shoes when they enter the mosque, and I only allow my spirit to go in there and paint.
Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been so deceived, but so well deceived that we can scarcely get back even a shadow of the truth.
There are more copies than originals among people.
I have always believed and still believe that artists who live and work with spiritual values cannot and should not remain indifferent to the conflict in which the highest values of humanity and civilization are at stake.
The trouble is, we’ve been taught what to see and how to render what we see. If only we could be in the position of those men who did those wonderful drawings in Lascaux and Altimira!
I am a communist and my painting is a communist painting. But if I were a shoemaker, Royalist or Communist or anything else, I would not necessarily hammer my shoes in any special way to show my politics.
An artist must be very careful not to look for models. As soon as one artist takes another as model, he is lost. There is no other point of departure than reality.
You have to start somewhere. You can always erase reality later on.
I have never made radically different experiments. Whenever I wanted to say something, I said it the way I believed I should.
Motivation is in the world around us. We have an infinite amount of material at our disposal, in the lives of those we meet, in what we see and feel, in what we discuss and from the passion of every woman.