Despite all the troubles of our world, in my heart I have never given up on the love in which I was brought up or on man's hope in love. In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art–the colour of love

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.

To call everything that appears illogical, fantasy, fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature.

Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe.

I am a little Jew of Vitebsk. All that I paint, all that I do, all that I am, is just the little Jew of Vitebsk.

If I weren't a Jew then I wouldn't be an artist, or at least not the one I am now.

What I mean by 'abstract' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements.