I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art.
Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.
Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.
If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of...kitsch.
One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.
The best way to begin is to say: 'Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at the paintings'.