When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.

You don't make art, you find it

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.

We have a lot of reasons but only one real one.

Races and religions may have changed, but the marketplace, the living quarters, pilgrimage sites, places of worship, have remained the same. Venus is replaced by the Virgin, but the same life goes on.

I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!