“An artist must forget painting when he paints. That’s the only way he will do original work.”

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Music and art are the guiding lights of the world.

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.

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

The artist draws the people. The whole idea is for people to dig themselves, just mingle around meeting different other people. That’s cool.

I don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of. Failure brings great rewards – in the life of an artist.

The best and only thing that one artist can do for another is to serve as an example and an inspiration.

That’s just a part of being an artist: you can’t write great stuff all the time, because if you did, then you’d be inhuman. The human side of people is that sometimes they fail.

I want to be a mature artist with a different kind of thinking.

I would say I grew without a doubt. My whole energy in life – as an artist and as a person – has definitely got me smarter and wiser.

In a painting, you can’t make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist’s stroke.