You mustn't always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.
— Pablo Picasso
The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.
If there were only one truth, you couldn't paint a hundred canvases on the same theme.
The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.
You have to have an idea of what you are going to do, but it should be a vague idea.
Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?
If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.
We don't grow older, we grow riper.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
One must act in painting as in life, directly.
Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture.
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.
Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.
Youth has no age.
The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.
Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar.
We must not discriminate between things. Where things are concerned there are no class distinctions. We must pick out what is good for us where we can find it.
Is there anything more dangerous than sympathetic understanding?
I have a horror of people who speak about the beautiful. What is the beautiful? One must speak of problems in painting!
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.
One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.
We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.
When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait.
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.
An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches in order that they can sing better.
If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.
To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.
There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.
Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?
There are only two types of women - goddesses and doormats.
Love is the greatest refreshment in life.
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Give me a museum and I'll fill it.
Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.
Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create.
What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.
What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist.
It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
