Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
For those who don't know what they are doing, painting is easy. For those who do know what they are doing, painting is difficult.
You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.
Conversation in real life is full of half-finished sentences and overlapping talk. Why shouldn't painting be too?
If I could have had my own way, I would have confined myself to black and white.
The artist does not draw what he sees, but what he has to make others see.
A man is an artist only at certain moments, by an effort of will. Objects have the same appearance for everybody.
Hitherto the nude has always been represented in poses which presuppose an audience. But my women are simple, honest creatures who are concerned with nothing beyond their physical occupations... it is as if you were looking through a keyhole.
The true traveler never arrives.
No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.
Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.
You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working.
Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.
It seems to me that today, if the artist wishes to be serious - to cut out a little original niche for himself, or at least preserve his own innocence of personality - he must once more sink himself in solitude. There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profit; in order to do anything at all we need (so to speak) the wit and ideas of our neighbors as much as the businessmen need the funds of others to win on the market. All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.
It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.
Make a drawing. Start it all over again, trace it. Start it and trace it again.
In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.
Great patience is called for on the hard path that I have entered on.
Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money.
I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.
There is love, and there is work; and we have only one heart.
A picture is first of all a product of the imagination of the artist; it must never be a copy.
What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.
I want to be famous but unknown!
And even this heart of mine has something artificial. The dancers have sewn it into a bag of pink satin, pink satin slightly faded, like their dancing shoes.
One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.
Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.
A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people
Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.
Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.
