What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

You know, what makes the prison disappear is every deep, serious attachment. To be friends, to be brothers, to love; that opens the prison through sovereign power, through a most powerful spell. But he who doesn't have that remains in death. But where sympathy springs up again, life springs up again.

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

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

I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers.

I never get tired of the blue sky.

The diseases that we civilized people labor under most are melancholy and pessimism.