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.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, "That's a pretty little thing," after I had finished a picture.

Taste! It doesn't exist. An artist makes beautiful things without being aware of it.

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

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.

So that's the telephone? They ring, and you run.