A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people.

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.

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.

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

It's easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50.

It is people's movement that consoles us. If the leaves of a tree did not move, how sad would be the tree - and so should we.