If you are a genius and unsuccessful, everybody treats you as if you were a genius, but when you come to be successful, when you commence to earn money, when you are really successful, then your family and everybody no longer treats you like a genius, they treat you like a man who has become successful.

There are more copies than originals among people.

Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy. (about Guernica).

We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.