“It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.”

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination. I photograph the things I don’t want to paint, things that are already in existence.

If I’d had the nerve, I’d have become a thief or a gangster, but since I didn’t, I became a photographer.

The tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.

Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

I am not going to be dictated to by the size of the camera. I use everything from an 8 x 10 to a 35-mm. But I don’t use these modern cameras which break down all the time !

l photograph what l do not wish to paint and l paint that which l cannot photograph.

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.

An original is a creation motivated by desire.

I paint when I cannot photograph.

I have never painted a recent picture.

I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor.

To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.

Oh, yes, I was a great retoucher. A retoucher is an esthetic surgeon !

I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.

The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects.

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

In this state of absorbed contemplation, there is no longer any question of holding an object in view.

In Los Angeles all the loose objects in the country were collected, as if America had been tilted and everything that wasn’t tightly screwed down had slid into Southern California.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

It is a beautiful trait in the lover’s character, that they think no evil of the object loved.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a . We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

The rights of persons, and the rights of property, are the objects, for the protection of which Government was instituted.