“Since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualize everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most.”

If you understand your painting beforehand, you might as well not paint it.

My art is capable of liberating man from the tyranny of the practical, rational world.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

So little of what could happen does happen.

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

I want to perceive and understand the hidden powers and laws of things, in order to have them in my power.

To be interesting, one has to provoke.

I’m going to live forever. Geniuses don’t die.

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life

The fact I myself do not understand what my paintings mean while I am painting them does not imply that they are meaningless.

I am making things that inspire me with a profound emotion and I am trying to paint them honestly.

I am the Don Quixote of unreality.

Do not strive to be a modern artist: it’s the one thing, unfortunately, you can’t help being.

I do not take drugs. I am drugs.

Sometimes I spit on my mother’s portrait for pleasure.

I think that there are a lot of law enforcement officers out there who work according to their own set of what is right and what is wrong. And that doesn’t always include respect for administration cops, you know, people that are higher up the food chain.

We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign people. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.

Perhaps without the lows, the highs could not be reached.

Never get high on your own supply.

I’m so high, it’s so lonely up here.

We must dare to be great; and we must realize that greatness is the fruit of toil and sacrifice and high courage.

Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that high destiny as the foremost of the enlightened nations of the world which, under Providence, we ought to achieve.