“I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.”

I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.

What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death.

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

I drank to drown my sorrows, but the damned things learned how to swim.

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of madness.

People in general are scared to death of the war and all the exhibition have been a failure, because the rich – don’t want to buy anything.

I think that little by little I’ll be able to solve my problems and survive.

I want a storm to come and flood us into a song that no one wrote.

Pain, pleasure and death are no more than a process for existence. The revolutionary struggle in this process is a doorway open to intelligence.

I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.

I was a child who went about in a world of colors. My friends, my companions, became women slowly; I became old in instants.

You deserve the best, the very best, because you are one of the few people in this lousy world who are honest to themselves, and that is the only thing that really counts.

There is nothing more precious than laughter.

I don’t know how to write love letters.

Of the opposite sex, I have the moustache and, in general, the face.

Painting completed my life. I lost three children and a series of other things that would have fulfilled my horrible life. My painting took the place of all of this. I think work is the best.

If A denotes one of the two constant traits, for example, the dominating one, a the recessive, and the Aa the hybrid form in which both are united, then the expression: gives the series for the progeny of plants hybrid in a pair of differing traits.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

It is my express wish that in awarding the [Nobel Prizes] no consideration be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be Scandinavian or not.

I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.

Dear Society’ really is my letter to society where I express the anguish I’ve been caused from such an image-based industry and culture we live in.

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Two things form the bedrock of any open society – freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don’t have those things, you don’t have a free country.