Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things.

The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

There's nothing worse than a brilliant beginning.

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

But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown-a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest.