“I advance all of my canvas at one time.”

Pleasure must be found in study.

The approbation of others is a stimulus of which one must sometimes be wary. The feeling of one’s own strength makes one modest.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else – by color.

All the theories mess you up inside.

I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I have not the magnificent richness of colouring that animates nature.

Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.

If I think, everything is lost.

I ask you to pray for me, for once age has overtaken us, we find consolation only in religion.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

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

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

You have no idea how life-giving it is to find around one a youth that agrees not to bury one on the spot.

Chatter about art is almost always useless.

There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art.

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

It’s so fine and yet so terrible to stand in front of a blank canvas.

The blank page gives us the right to dream.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

I am so tired of waking to the blank canvas of morning and realizing it won’t be painted with you.

I love to go down to the schoolyard and watch all the little children jump up and down and run around yelling and screaming. They don’t know I’m only using blanks.

I like Stallone, because he writes. He sits down with a blank page and comes up with another Rambo movie. That isn’t very easy for anybody. He’s made it successful on top of that.

I become a bit of a blank page in public. And that’s precisely why I like acting.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.