(Art is) the residue of vision.

I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!

I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. . . . So long as I've learned something about why.

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

I don't know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can't do what I want to do.

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