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.

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.

Can my words distill for you a little sweetness, tender and caressing?

Great art picks up where nature ends.

All our interior world is reality, and that, perhaps, more so than our apparent world.

All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.

One fine day as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, Mama I want to be a painter.