The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves.

What matters is real love for things of the world outside us and for the deep secrets within us.

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.

What I want to show in my work is the idea which hides itself behind so-called reality.

I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones.

I went across the fields to avoid the straight highways, along the firing lines where people were shooting at a small wooded hill, which is now covered with wooden crosses and lines of graves instead of spring flowers.