When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don't have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you

I don't work from nature, I work like nature.

How often have I found that wanting to use blue, I didn't have it so I used a red instead of the blue.

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

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.

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