“I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. So long as I’ve learned something about why.”

The older I grow, the more I find myself alone.

I’ve been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

Once the object has been constructed, I have a tendency to rediscover in it, transformed and displaced, images, impressions, facts which have deeply moved me (often without my knowing it).

I’ve tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.

What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.

The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and – instead of giving up – you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling – be it an illusion or not – that something new has opened up.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.

Art is the residue of vision.

Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.

I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.

I know where I wanna end up. I’m ready to go, and I’m ready to learn. I’m ready to build, and I’m ready to establish my longevity.

For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

The essence of childhood, of course, is play, which my friends and I did endlessly on streets that we reluctantly shared with traffic.

What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.

So basically I did this whole show carrying 100lbs, looking out of one eye, dancing – and then my tits explode at the end. It’s not as easy as it looks!