I understand my own pictures best six months after I have done them.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

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

When you are young and without success, you have only a few friends. Then, later on, when you are rich and famous, you still have a few... if you are lucky.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism: one looks in such a way at the model, that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.