All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

When I was a kid I drew like Michelangelo. It took me years to learn to draw like a kid.

I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.

Because I cannot work except in solitude, it is necessary that I live my work and that is impossible except in solitude.

Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else.

We didn't want to sign the painting itself, that would have interfered with the composition. And even later, for that reason or for another, I sometimes marked my canvases on the back. If you don't see my signature and the date, madam, it's because the frame is hiding it.