Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.

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.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

You mustn't always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.

Art is lies that tell the truth.

If there is something to steal, I steal it.

We can see the light but we are still inside the tunnel, ... We have not been able to get to all the communities.