Pablo Picasso

Sex and art are the same thing.

If one knows exactly what is going to be done, why do it?

Forcing yourself to use restricted means is the sort of restraint that liberates invention. It obliges you to make a kind of progress that you can't even imagine in advance.

The only thing that's important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.

To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing... When I find myself facing a blank page, that’s always going through my head. What I capture in spite of myself interests me more than my own ideas.

If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was.

I like all paintings. I always look at the paintings, good or bad, in barbershops, furniture stores, provincial hotels. I'm like a drinker who needs wine. As long as it is wine, it doesn't matter which wine.

There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?

When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.

As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language.

One never knows what one is going to do. One starts a painting and then it becomes something quite different.

The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.

I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.