The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face.

You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.

I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? There's no such thing. I never "appreciate," any more than I "like." I love it or I hate.

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

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

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.