“It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.”

Monet is only an eye, but my God, what an eye!

There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

Painting is founded on the heart controlled by the head.

The sun penetrates me soundlessly like a distant friend that stirs up my laziness, fertilizes it. We bring forth life.

It is not about painting life, it is about making the painting alive.

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

When I start thinking, all is lost.

Nature is the best instructor.

The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.

It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.

I am the primitive of the method I have invented.

Painting is damned difficult – you always think you’ve got it, but you haven’t.

Literature expresses itself by abstractions, whereas painting, by means of drawing and colour, gives concrete shape to sensations and perceptions.

I have not tried to reproduce nature; I have represented it.

I am beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me, and you know that the good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after mature consideration.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole.

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension – the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality… to protect myself.

At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model.

Reserve the language of sculpture for the art of sculpture. Lest you confuse beauty with the shape of a jaw or art with the size of a stomach.