I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted ... the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head

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

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.

I was walking along a road one evening – on one side lay the city, and below me was the fjord. The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming – it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colours screamed.

It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.