“All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.”

Techniques vary, art stays the same; it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive.

Zaandam has enough to paint for a lifetime.

When it is dark, it seems to me as if I were dying, and I can’t think any more.

I despise the opinion of the press and the so-called critics.

I’ve said it before and can only repeat that I owe everything to Boudin and I attribute my success to him. I came to be fascinated by his studies, the products of what I call instantaneity.

I would advise young artists to paint as they can, as long as they can, without being afraid of painting badly.

What I need most of all is color, always, always.

My heart is forever in Giverny.

I do what I can to convey what I experience before nature and most often, in order to succeed in conveying what I feel, I totally forget the most elementary rules of painting, if they exist that is.

I’m never finished with my paintings; the further I get, the more I seek the impossible and the more powerless I feel.

Nothing in the whole world is of interest to me but my painting and my flowers.

Perhaps it’s true that I’m very hard on myself, but that’s better than exhibiting mediocre work… too few were satisfactory enough to trouble the public with.

I’ve only myself to blame for it, my impotence most of all and my weakness. If I do any good work now it will be only by chance.

I didn’t become an impressionist. As long as I can remember I always have been one.

I’m in fine fettle and fired with a desire to paint.

These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.

All our feelings, like the artist’s paints and brush, are ways of communicating and sharing something meaningful from us to the world.

If I dreamt this, while walking, walking in the London streets, the subconscious of each and every other life, past and present, brushing me in passing, what makes it real? Writing it down.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

I take the most wrenchingly painful moments of my life, brush them off and present them for the amusement of others. Luckily for me, my childhood was torture.

Ay Dad, brush my hair one time. Hey pops! Come brush my hair.

We never pick up a brush and stand in front of our own easel.

Life gets so ridiculous, you just have to brush it off like sand and laugh. I think the laughter is good medicine for crap-itis.

Just as I work with paints, brushes, and canvas, I work with the light, pieces of glass and chemistry.