“The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.”

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don’t think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.

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

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won’t know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist’s obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

When one lives with problems of importance, the prostitute is ideal. You pay, and whether or not you fail is of no importance. She doesn’t care.

The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.

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

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it).

I’ve tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.

What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.

The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and – instead of giving up – you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling – be it an illusion or not – that something new has opened up.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

Almost every natural man that hears of hell, flatters himself that he shall escape it.

Love It, is to increase by forgetting. It’s escape through a single being to mediocrity of all other. It’s one more for trying to be less.

This I ask, is it not madness to kill thyself in order to escape death?

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

Comedy can simultaneously allow you to dive headfirst into the world’s pain and escape it.

I can’t take it all in or else I’ll grow cold when the heat already escapes my fingers and toes.

Reading has always been my sweetest escape, but I write to convey that which I want to escape or what scares me to say, even if it’s something positive.

I escaped the voice of darkness that was as pervasive as the silence that has come to replace all the words you had misplaced.