To arrive at abstraction, it is always necessary to begin with a concrete reality.

The artist spends the first part of his life with the dead, the second with the living, and the third with himself.

Those who attempts to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time.

If there is something to steal, I steal it.

I don't think I'm wrong when I say that the most beautiful objects of the "stone age" were made of skin, fabric, and especially wood. The "stone age" ought to be called the "wood age." How many African statues are made of stone, bone, or ivory? Maybe one in a thousand! And prehistoric man had no more ivory at his disposal than African tribes. Maybe even less. He must have had thousands of wooden fetishes, all gone now.

Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

To be young, really young, takes a very long time.