Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious - to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality - he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

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.

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.