I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it).

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don't think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.