I am a great artist and I know it. It’s because I am that I have endured such sufferings.
A hint – don’t paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God – to create like our Divine Master.
In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn’t the revolutionary’s work become official, once the State takes it over?
Soon I’ll be old and I’ve done precious little in this world for lack of time. I am always afraid I’ll become senile before I’ve finished what I’ve undertaken.
Sometimes people accuse me of being incomprehensible only because they look for an explicative side to my pictures which is not there.
The landscape with its violent, pure colours dazzled and blinded me. I was always uncertain...
When the physical organism breaks up, the soul survives. It then takes on another body.
Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?
Do not finish your work too much. An impression is not sufficiently durable for its first freshness to survive a belated search for infinite detail; in this way you let the lava grow cool...
Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionist.
Happiness and work rose up together with the sun, radiant like it.
Whatever may happen the sun will rise tomorrow as it rose to-day, beneficent and serene.
A bit of advice, don’t copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amid nature, extrapolate art from it, and concentrate on what you will create as a result.
All the joys – animal and human – of a free life are mine. I have escaped everything that is artificial, conventional, customary.
I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world.
A critic is someone who meddles with something that is none of his business.
Why did I hesitate to put all this glory of the sun on my canvas?
Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece.
Life is merely a fraction of a second. An infinitely small amount of time to fulfill our desires, our dreams, our passions.
But I owe something to Vincent, and that is, in the consciousness of having been useful to him, the confirmation of my own original ideas about painting. And also, at difficult moments, the remembrance that one finds others unhappier than oneself.