Art critic! Is that a profession? When I think we are stupid enough, we painters, to solicit those people's compliments and to put ourselves into their hands! What shame! Should we even accept that they talk about our work?

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

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.

An artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime.

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.

The frame is the pimp of painting; it enhances it, but it must never shine at the painting's expense.

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