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.

The only thing to do is to go one's own way, to try one's best, to make the thing live.

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 am always doing what I can't do yet in order to learn how to do it.

An artist need not be a minister or a collector in church, but he must have a warm heart for people, and I find it a noble thing that, for example, no winter passed without The Graphic doing something to keep alive sympathy for the poor.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

I always dream a painting like that, with a group of lively figures of the pals.