“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.”

My hand tells me what I’m thinking.

I’d like to live as a poor man with lots of money.

I paint the way some people write an autobiography. The paintings, finished or not, are the pages from my diary.

The quality of a painter depends on the amount of past he carries with him.

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.

Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?

When I haven’t any blue I use red.

Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do it’s bidding.

Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.

Paradise is to love many things with a passion.

Unless your work gives you trouble, it is no good.

If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse, but surely you will see the wildness!

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.

Love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons.

Art is a leap into the dark.

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.

The art of medicine cannot be inherited, nor can it be copied from books

I think it was [Jean-Luc] Godard who said that life is nothing but a bad copy of film, but then our ambition must be to make better films and better shapes of forms that are given in life.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

I really haven’t seen The Report in a long time. I don’t have a copy, but I’ll have to see it again. I think it would be good to put both these men next to each other.

Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

It’s not just about looking and copying, it’s about feeling too.

America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.