When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.

The first half of life is learning to be an adult-the second half is learning to be a child.

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

Now there is fame! Of all - hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public - fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is true.

There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?

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.

I don't think I'm wrong when I say that the most beautiful objects of the "stone age" were made of skin, fabric, and especially wood. The "stone age" ought to be called the "wood age." How many African statues are made of stone, bone, or ivory? Maybe one in a thousand! And prehistoric man had no more ivory at his disposal than African tribes. Maybe even less. He must have had thousands of wooden fetishes, all gone now.