A visual experience is vitalizing. Whereas to write great poetry, to draw continuously on one's inner life, is not merely exhausting, it is to keep alight a consuming fire.

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling... The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as 'pure form' is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.

Almost all great painters in old age arrive at the same kind of broad, simplified style, as if they wanted to summarise the whole of their experience in a few strokes and blobs of colour.

One musn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans.

I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

Only the bad artists of the nineteenth century were frightened by the invention of photography; the good ones all welcomed it and used it.

The nude does not simply represent the body, but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience.