The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

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.

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

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.

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

What a horrible thing yellow is.

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