Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.

I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man's urge to open his heart

It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity.

What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.

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.