Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! . . . I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with 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.

Nature does many things the way I do, but she hides them!

Nothing can be done without solitude. I've created my own solitude which nobody suspects

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart