“Never, even as a child, would I bend to a rule.”

I work at my garden all the time and with love. What I need most are flowers, always. My heart is forever in Giverny.

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Everything changes, even stone.

Light is the most important person in the picture.

I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.

I still don’t know where I am going to sleep tomorrow.

When I look at nature I feel as if I’ll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you’re working.

Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is fog that gives it its magnificent amplitude its regular and massive blocks become grandiose in that mysterious mantle.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

The real subject of every painting is light.

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment.

My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.

When I work I forget all the rest.

Children are our future we must take care of them with maximum effort.

Participating in a gun buy-back program because you think that criminals have too many guns is like having yourself castrated because you think your neighbors have too many kids.

I think racism is something that is passed on and taught to our kids, and that’s a shame.

I was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

Some men like a dull life – they like the routine of eating breakfast, going to work, coming home, petting the dog, watching TV, kissing the kids, and going to bed. Stay clear of it – it’s often catching.

Playing our parts. Yes, we all have to do that and from childhood on, I have found that my own character has been much harder to play worthily and far harder at times to comprehend than any of the roles I have portrayed.

Children have a master to teach them, grown-ups have the poets.

I am not finding pregnancy much of a joy. I am afraid of childbirth, but I am afraid I can’t find a way of avoiding it.