There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.
The thrill of creation which we experience which we experience when we see a masterpiece is not unlike the feeling of the artist who created it; such a work is a fragment of the world which he has annexed and which belongs to him alone.
The only domain where the divine is visible is that of art, whatever name we choose to call it.
Every young man’s heart is a graveyard in which are inscribed the names of a thousand dead artists but whose only actual denizens are a few mighty, often antagonistic, ghosts.
The basic problem is that our civilization, which is a civilization of machines, can teach man everything except how to be a man.
A break in the established order is never the work of chance. It is the outcome of a man’s resolve to turn life to account.
Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.
Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.
Seldom is a Gothic head more beautiful than when broken.
Every great masterpiece is a purification of the world.
To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it’s better not to be a fish.
Since 1789 history has had a new perspective, revolution being a successful revolt, and revolt a revolution that has failed.
If you can’t make art, make your life a work of art.
Every creation is, at its root, the struggle between potential form and imitated form.
Opium teaches only one thing, which is that aside from physical suffering, there is nothing real.
There’s no such thing as a grown up person.
War puts its questions stupidly, peace mysteriously.
Just as a musician loves music and not nightingales, and a poet loves poetry and not sunsets, a painter is not primarily a person who responds to figures and landscapes. He is primarily one who loves pictures.
No one can endure his own solitude.
Chanel, General De Gaulle and Picasso are the three most important figures of our time.
Some pictures are in the gallery because they belong to humanity and others because they belong to the United States.