Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.

We were created to look at one another, weren't we?

Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

A picture is first of all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy.