I intend to do a large painting of the cliff at Etretat, although it is terribly bold of me to do so after Courbet has painted it so admirably, but I will try to do it in a different way...
My life has been nothing but a failure.
What can be said about a man who is interested in nothing but his painting? It’s a pity if a man can only interest himself in one thing. But I can’t do any thing else. I have only one interest.
A good impression is lost so quickly...
I’ve only myself to blame for it, my impotence most of all and my weakness. If I do any good work now it will be only by chance.
I’m very happy, very delighted. I’m setting to like a fighting cockerel, for I’m surrounded here by all that I love.
Thanks to my work everything’s going well; it’s a great consolation.
I’ve spent so long on some paintings that I no longer know what to think of them, and I am definitely getting harder to please; nothing satisfies me...
I say that whoever claims to have finished a canvas is terribly arrogant.
As for myself, I met with as much success as I ever could have wanted. In other words, I was enthusiastically run-down by every critic of the period.
Gardening was something I learned in my youth when I was unhappy. I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.
I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.
I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel.
No one but myself knows the anxiety I go through and the trouble I give myself to finish paintings which do not satisfy me and seem to please so very few others.
The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all’s said and done, a matter of habit.
For almost two months now I’ve been struggling away with no result.
I let a good many mistakes show through when fixing my sensations. It will always be the same and this is what makes me despair.
I’m going to get down to a still life on a size 50 canvas of rayfish and dogfish with old fishermen’s baskets. Then I’m going to turn out a few pictures to send wherever possible, given that now, first and foremost – unfortunately – I have to earn some money.
Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room...
Getting up at 4 in the morning, I slave away all day until by the evening I’m exhausted, and I end by forgetting all my responsibilities, thinking only of the work I’ve set out to do.
It is only too easy to catch people’s attention by doing something worse than anyone else has dared to do it before.