I hate that aesthetic game of the eye and the mind, played by these connoisseurs, these mandarins who "appreciate" beauty. What is beauty, anyway? Th….

It would be very curious to record by means of photographs, not the stage of the picture, but its metamorphoses. Perhaps one would perceive the path ….

A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions..

People want to find a 'meaning' in everything and everyone. That's the disease of our age....

All art is subversive..

It is important to remember that great things have no fear of time. We've got to let go of the idea that what we want to manifest has to be done on o….

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working..

If you have five elements available use only four. If you have four elements use three..

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth..

It took me a lifetime..

If you are trying to find something, it means you haven't got it. And if you find it simply by looking for it, that means it's false..

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 ….

The only pictorial matter that is of interest to me is the matter and sentiments brought about by the work itself..

Something sacred, that's it. We ought to be able to say that such and such a painting is as it is, with its capacity for power, because it is "touche….

Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in chan….

Painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us..

A picture lives by its legend - not by anything else..

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?.

I don't know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colours I am going to use..

Almost every evening, either I went to [Georges] Braque's studio or Braque came to mine. Each of us had to see what the other had done during the day….

I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter….