For instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully.

For the great doesn't happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.

I was certainly going the right way for a stroke when I left Paris. I paid for it nicely afterwards! When I stopped drinking, when I stopped smoking so much, when I began to think again instead of trying not to think - Good Lord, the depression and the prostration of it! Work in these magnificent natural surroundings (Arles) has restored my morale, but even now some efforts are too much for me: my strength fails me.

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.

Here everything is so wholly what I consider beautiful. In other words, there is peace here.

If I succeed in putting some warmth and love into the work, then it will find friends. Carrying on working is the

Someday death will take us to another star.