Ibsen is like this room where we are sitting, with all the tables and chairs. Do I care whether you have twenty or twenty-five links on your chain? Hedda Gabler, Nora and the rest: it is not that I want! I want Rome and the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Athens; I want beauty, and the flame of life.

The one happiness is to shut one's door upon a little room, with a table before one, and to create; to create life in that isolation from life.

I have the greatest of all riches: that of not desiring them.

All that I have to offer as an artist is the revelation of my soul

If I had my will, I would live in a ship on the sea and never come nearer to humanity than that!

I did not use paint, I made myself up morally.

If I were twenty or thirty years younger, I would start afresh in this field with the certainty of accomplishing much. But I should have to learn from the bottom up, forgetting the theatre entirely and concentrating on the special medium of this new art. My mistake, and that of many others, lay in employing "theatrical" techniques despite every effort to avoid them. Here is something quite, quite fresh, a penetrating form of visual poetry, an untried exponent of the human soul. Alas, I am too old for it!