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

The role of the artist, like that of the scholar, consists of seizing current truths often repeated to him, but which will take on new meaning for him and which he will make his own when he has grasped their deepest significance.

Art is an escape from reality.

Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting should begin by cutting out his own tongue

I don't paint women, I paint pictures. . . What I am after above all is expression. If in a portrait I put eyes, a nose, a mouth, there isn't much use; on the contrary it paralyses the imagination of the spectator, and obliges us to see the person in a certain way.

We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.