Art should be something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.

To draw is to make an idea precise. Drawing is the precision of thought.

The portrait is one of the most curious art forms. It demands special qualities in the artist, and an almost total kinship with the model.

In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.

With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.

Colours have their own distinctive beauty that you have to preserve, just as in music you try to preserve sounds. It is a question of organization, of finding the arrangement that will keep the beauty and freshness of the colour

The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.