If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

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

To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.

Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.

An artist is an explorer.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.

It would be a mistake to ascribe this creative power to an inborn talent. In art, the genius creator is not just a gifted being, but a person who has succeeded in arranging for their appointed end, a complex of activities, of which the work is the outcome. The artist begins with a vision — a creative operation requiring an effort. Creativity takes courage.