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

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

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

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.