"If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white."
"Painting is very easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do."
"Art is really a battle."
"The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see."
"Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it at 50."
"The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them."
"Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things."
"A picture is something which requires as much knavery, trickery, and deceit as the perpetration of a crime."
"What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me."
"Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression, a species of writing: it reveals, better than does his painting, his true personality."
"No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament ... I know nothing."
"It is essential to do the same subject over again, ten times, a hundred times. Nothing in art must seen to be chance, not even movement."
"A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."
"I'm glad I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death."
"There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profits.... All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment."
"There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart."
"Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body."
"No art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament ... I know nothing."
"A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."
"A picture is something which requires as much knavery, trickery, and deceit as the perpetration of a crime."
"Everyone has talent at 25. The difficulty is to have it at 50."
"The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he must make others see."
"Art is really a battle."
"What use is my mind? Granted that it enables me to hail a bus and to pay my fare. But once I am inside my studio, what use is my mind? I have my model, my pencil, my paints. My mind doesn't interest me."
"Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body."