“I always feel the desire to look for the extraordinary in ordinary things; to suggest, not to impose, to leave always a slight touch of mystery in my paintings.”

I had only planned to strike the gong violently in order to somehow shake people up and make them more aware. I think I succeeded.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Painting is a source of endless pleasure, but also of great anguish.

The best way to begin is to say: ‘Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. And now let us have a look at the paintings’.

If you speak of beauty, you are at once suspected of…kitsch.

I will always find even the worst paintings that attempt some kind of representation better than the best invented paintings.

I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art.

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

Painting what I experience, translating what I feel, is a great liberation. But it is also work, self-examination, consciousness, criticism, struggle.

You never know when some small thing will lead to a big idea.

Travel is very inspirational – but it’s in the ordinary that I find my themes of love and work and family.

Men who neglect philosophy while busying themselves with ordinary affairs are like the Suitors [in the Odyssey] who desired Penelope but went to bed with her maids.

And they are as inefficient as the sleepy dose of an ordinary sermon.

Gaiety is a quality of ordinary men. Genius always presupposes some disorder in the machine.

The years go by one after the other; time slips past us with out our being aware of it; we grow old like ordinary men and we shall end like them.

If you’re at the sink washing the cup, wash the cup. Don’t worry about everything else. We forget to appreciate the simplest moments of the day, the sublime in the ordinary.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.