Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.
No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.
Art is vice. One does not wed it, one rapes it.
A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.