Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

Starting to paint, I felt gloriously free, quiet, and alone.

You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.

Seek the strongest color effect possible... the content is of no importance.

If people knew what Matisse, supposedly the painter of happiness, had gone through, the anguish and tragedy he had to overcome to manage to capture that light which has never left him, if people knew all that, they would also realize that this happiness, this light, this dispassionate wisdom which seems to be mine, are sometimes well-deserved, given the severity of my trials.

A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.