If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.
The people no longer seek consolation in art. But the refined people, the rich, the idlers seek the new, the extraordinary, the extravagant, the scandalous.
Those trying to explain pictures are as a rule completely mistaken.
I don’t own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that’s a luxury I cannot afford.
Never copy yourself, always copy someone else.
The only thing emanating from my pictures should be emotion.
I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who “appreciate” beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There’s no such thing. I never “appreciate,” any more than I “like.” I love it or I hate.
In life you throw a ball. You hope it will reach a wall and bounce back so you can throw it again. You hope your friends will provide that wall.
Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can’t drink any more.
I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.
It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.
The only thing that’s important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.
Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it’s true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That’s what’s important.
While I am working I am not conscious of what I am putting on the canvas.
If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn’t tell you.
People who read are people who dream.
Only when painting isn’t painting can there be an affront to modesty.
Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.
The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.