“I do not believe in the art which is not the compulsive result of man’s urge to open his heart.”

My breakthrough came very late in life, really only starting when I was 50. I had the strength for new deeds and ideas.

I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.

All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart’s blood. Art is your heart’s blood.

The way one sees is also dependent upon one’s emotional state of mind. This is why a motif can be looked at in so many ways, and this is what makes art so interesting.

Without fear and illness, I could never have accomplished all I have.

A work of art comes only from inside a human being.

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.

My will exceeds my talents.

When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights.

I don’t believe in an art that is not born out of man’s need to open his heart.

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man.

The Academies of Art are nothing but great painting factories – those with talent are fed in at one end, and they come out as mechanical painting machines.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

It is better to have a good painting with ten holes than ten bad paintings without any holes.