“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.”

There is a battle that goes on between men and women. Many people call it love.

And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?

I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.

Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.

Any number of holier-than-thou honorable realists walk around in the belief that they have accomplished something, simply because they tell you for the hundredth time that a field is green and a red-painted house is painted red.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

Photography is an art which touches and grips one’s own heart’s blood.

I do not paint what I see, but what I saw.

Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being… You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.

I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted the clouds as actual blood. The colour shrieked.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

Anybody who perceives colors can become a painter. It’s simply a question of whether or not one has felt anything and whether one has the courage to recount the things one has felt.

I didn’t go to Harvard because I thought they had good academics. I went because they had crappy enough sports so they’d let me play.

American history has fallen more and more into the hands of academics.

I’ve always put great emphasis on the academics and getting your degree. It’s important because basketball is short term. The long term is what are you gonna do after college and after you no longer can bounce the ball.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

There is, however, another purpose to which academies contribute. When they consist of a limited number of persons, eminent for their knowledge, it becomes an object of ambition to be admitted on their list.