To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

It is my misfortune - and probably my delight - to use things as my passions tell me. What a miserable fate for a painter who adores blondes to have to stop himself putting them into a picture because they don't go with the basket of fruit! . . . I put all the things I like into my pictures. The things - so much the worse for them. They just have to put up with it.

Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.

My mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

I paint the way someone bites his fingernails; for me, painting is a bad habit because I don't know nor can I do anything else.

When I paint a woman in an armchair, the armchair is there to show illness and death-or as a protection.