The more I become decomposed, the more sick and fragile I am, the more I become an artist.
If the storm within gets too loud, I take a glass too much to stun myself.
In a sense I’m glad that I’ve never learned how to paint.
The best pictures are always those one dreams of when one is smoking a pipe in bed, but which never get done. But still one ought to try, however incompetent one may feel before the unspeakable perfection and radiant splendour of nature.
I take great care of myself by carefully shutting myself away.
But you must love with a sublime, genuine, profound sympathy, with devotion, with intelligence, and you must try all the time to understand Him more, better and yet more. That will lead to God, that will lead to an unshakeable faith .
One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.
As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it Absolutely.
Perhaps someday everyone will have neurosis.
There are so many people, especially among our comrades, who imagine that words are nothing – on the contrary, isn’t it true that saying a thing well is as interesting and as difficult as painting it?
There is the same difference in a person before and after he is in love, as there is in an unlighted lamp and one that is burning.
How to achieve such anomalies, such alterations and re-fashionings of reality so what comes out of it are lies, if you like, but lies that are more than literal truth.
I cannot help thinking that the best way of knowing God is to love many things. Love this friend, this person, this thing, whatever you like, and you will be on the right road to understanding Him better.
I myself believe that there is in every painter’s life a period of making absurdities. In my case I think that period is already long past.
The canvas has an idiotic stare and mesmerises some painters so much that they turn into idiots themselves.
The more you love, the more you suffer.
I believe I do much better for the time being by first copying some good things than by working without that foundation.
We are having wind and rain here, and I am very glad not to be alone. I work from memory on bad days, and that would not do if I were alone.
We take death to reach a star.
I would like to leave this world and never return. I severed my ear, but how I wish that I had severed my heart. I shall never amount to anything.