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.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.

I know that to paint the sea really well, you need to look at it every hour of every day in the same place so that you can understand its way in that particular spot; and that is why I am working on the same motifs over and over again, four or six times even.

I get madder and madder on giving back what I feel.

To have gone to all this trouble to get to this is just too stupid! Outside there's brilliant sunshine but I don't feel up to looking at it.