“When I make my drawings… the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.”

Art is the residue of vision.

Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.

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

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

In a fire, between a Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat.

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.

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

Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn’t it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.

The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldnt have to paint at all.

I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. So long as I’ve learned something about why.

The head is what matters. The rest of the body plays the part of antennae making life possible for people and life itself is inside the skull.

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.

All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.

Drawing is one of those things which sit on the uneasy bending line between instinct and instruction, where seeming perversity eventually trumps pleasure as the card players and the kibitzers interact and new thrills are sought.

The blankness invites scribbling on, mental drawing , and the best feeling I know – apart from the more obvious sensual ones – is the feeling of putting down the first thought and seeing it turn into symbols.

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer’s art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

A people who have suffered so much for so long at the hands of a racist society must draw the line somewhere.

If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.

I’ve been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs. I’ve been on both sides of it all, I guess. So there’s not one specific event or thought that I’m dealing with or drawing from necessarily.