A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.

I have been no more than a medium, as it were.

I've been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.

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.

...for whether we want to or not, we belong to our time and we share in its opinions, its feelings, even its delusions.

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.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.