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

These women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition... it is as though one were watching through a keyhole.

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

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

I should like to be famous and unknown.

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

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.