Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better.

Much of the beauty that arises in art comes from the struggle an artist wages with his limited medium.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

To arrive is to be in prison.

When an artist or student draws a nude figure with painstaking care, the result is drawing, and not emotion.

Everything that we see in our daily lives is more or less distorted by acquired habits and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when cinema posters and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye what prejudices are to the mind. The effort to see things without distortion demands a kind of courage; and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he were seeing it for the first time.

The essential thing is to work in a state of mind that approaches prayer.