Picasso never thought of himself as avant-garde. I just find it a bad way to think of yourself.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning.

If you try consciously to be avant-garde, it's a little dangerous, like the present state of modern painting, where dealers try to be avant-garde, and under this pretext, painters take some old scraps and call it avant-garde.

The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return.

Retirement may be looked upon either as a prolonged holiday or as a rejection, a being thrown on to the scrap-heap.

However gifted an individual is at the outset, if his or her talents cannot be developed because of his or her social condition, because of the surrounding circumstances, these talents will be still-born.

It's so easy to be mistaken about the future. Sometimes there are avant-gardes which believe themselves to be the avant-garde and which later find themselves to be absolutely dated.