I've never felt a desire (and I don't believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work... a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things.

What is true is that I have at times earned my own crust of bread, and at other times a friend has given it to me out of the goodness of his heart. I have lived whatever way I could, for better or for worse, taking things just as they came.

The wheat field has ...poetry; it is like a memory of something one has once seen. We can only make our pictures speak.

If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.

The sight of stars always sets me dreaming just as naively as those black dots on a map set me dreaming of towns and villages. Why should these points of light in the firmament, I wonder, be less accessible than the dark ones on the map of France? We take a train to go to Torascon or Roven and we take death to a star.

l can do very well without God both in my life and in my painting, but l cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than l, which is my life — the power to create.

I'll start with small things.