I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

Your face encompasses the beauty of the whole earth. Your lips, as red as ripening fruit, gently part as if in pain. It is the smile of a corpse. Now the hand of death touches life. The chain is forged that links the thousand families that are dead to the thousand generations to come.

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

The viewers must come to understand the sacredness of painting, so they will remove their hats as if they were in church.