“Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.”

Through my art I have tried to explain my life and its meaning. I have also intended to help others to clarify their lives.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.

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.

Without anxiety and illness I would have been like a ship without a rudder.

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.