Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me.

There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is!

Yellow is capable of charming God.

But I must work on in full calmness and serenity... The world concerns me only in so far as I feel a certain debt and duty towards it, because I have walked on the earth for thirty years, and out of gratitude want to leave some souvenir in the shape of drawings or pictures, not made to please a certain tendency in art, but to express a sincere human feeling. So this work is the aim-and through concentration upon that one idea, everything one does is simplified. Now the work goes slowly-a reason the more to lose no time.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

I am a man of passions, capable of and subject to doing more or less foolish things- which I happen to regret, more or less, afterwards.

What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.