 Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light. |
| In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head. |
| I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw. |
| In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color. |
| No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love. |
| A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself. |
| To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction. |
| Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness. |
| One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor. |
| When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness. |
| I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me. |
| The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas. |
| Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul. |
| Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life. |
| Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life. |
| I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell. |
| By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life. |
| The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose. |
| Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes. |
| This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution. |
