Art is the soul of a people.

The most difficult object in painting is yourself because you're always at issue

It was not my aim to paint about the Negro in America in terms of propaganda. It is to depict the life of my people as I know it, passionately and dispassionately as Brueghel.

Sometimes the mind relives things very clearly for us...There are roads out of secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.

What I've attempted to do is establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.

You don't paint what you see, you paint what you feel.

The artist confronts chaos. The whole thing of art is, how do you organize chaos?