Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.

Through education comes understanding. Through understanding comes true appreciation. All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions.

It's not what the artist does that counts; it's what he is.

I have a real passion for bones. I have many others in Boisgeloup: skeletons of birds, dog's and sheep's heads. I even have a rhinoceros skull.