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

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.

Lots of people will protest that it’s quite unreal and that I’m out of my mind, but that’s just too bad.

I’m enjoying the most perfect tranquillity, free from all worries, and in consequence would like to stay this way forever, in a peaceful corner of the countryside like this.

Despite my extremely modest prices, dealers and art lovers are turning their backs on me. It is very depressing to see the lack of interest shown in an art object which has no market value.

I don’t think I’m made for any earthly kind of pleasure.

It is a tragedy that we live in a world where physical courage is so common, and moral courage is so rare.

The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.

Despite my exhaustion I have a devil of a time getting to sleep because of the rats above my bed and a pig who lives beneath my room.

I’m working hard with more determination than ever. My success at the Salon led to my selling several paintings and since your absence I have made 800 francs; I hope, when I have contracts with more dealers, it will be better still.

As for myself, I met with as much success as I ever could have wanted. In other words, I was enthusiastically run-down by every critic of the period.

My life has been nothing but a failure.

One day Boudin said to me, ‘Learn to draw well and appreciate the sea, the light, the blue sky.’ I took his advice.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life – but there was no one to tell me.

Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.

Lawlessness is lawlessness. Anarchy is anarchy is anarchy. Neither race nor color nor frustration is an excuse for either lawlessness or anarchy.

When I was a kid, we said that we were precluded from going to certain neighborhoods because of the color of our skin Now the neighborhoods are the neighborhoods of ideas, youre not supposed to be there because of the color of your skin.

Music to me is a voice, my voice, it’s my way of expressing what colours can I bring in, what emotions, what feel. What ideas can I bring out from these instruments that would make this song come alive.