“If you understand a painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.”

It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

If I’m going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.

Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.

The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.

Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art.

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.

Liking money like I like it, is nothing less than mysticism. Money is a glory.

Freedom of any kind is the worst for creativity.

Do not be afraid of perfection – you will never attain it.

Genius has to pass over madness and madness over genius.

Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business – everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs.

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.

Today, I painted with blood.

Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It’s wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.

I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house and the boat are to be found – the beauty of the air around them, and that is nothing less than the impossible.

The only merit I have is to have painted directly from nature with the aim of conveying my impressions in front of the most fugitive effects.

I’ve done what I could as a painter and that seems to me to be sufficient. I don’t want to be compared to the great masters of the past, and my painting is open to criticism; that’s enough.

I am good at only two things, and those are gardening and painting.