The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.

To know what you're going to draw, you have to begin drawing.

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age...

When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you

We might adapt for the artist the joke about there being nothing more dangerous than instruments of war in the hands of generals. In the same way, there is nothing more dangerous than justice in the hands of judges, and a paint brush in the hands of a painter! Just think of the danger to society! But today we haven't the heart to expel the painters and poets because we no longer admit to ourselves that there is any danger in keeping them in our midst.

My whole life has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against Reaction and the death of art.