So little of what could happen does happen.
Everything alters me, but nothing changes me.
It's better to have loved and lost than do forty pounds of laundry a week.
Begin by learning to draw and paint like the old masters. After that, you can do as you like; everyone will respect you.
There is only one difference between a madman and myself. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.
I believe that the moment is near when by a procedure of active paranoiac thought, it will be possible to systematize confusion and contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.
Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.
The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
Now sexual obsessions are the basis of artistic creation. Accumulated frustration leads to what Freud calls the process of sublimation. Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art.
Let my enemies devour each other.
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature, understand them thoroughly.
Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them.
To be interesting, one has to provoke.
At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.
Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.
I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.
The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.
Happy is he who causes a scandal.
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.