“When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.”

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist’s obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

When one lives with problems of importance, the prostitute is ideal. You pay, and whether or not you fail is of no importance. She doesn’t care.

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.

People don’t come to see a Billie Eilish show to come to see me. They come to see her. So I just try not to screw up too much on my instruments.

If you see somebody dressing like me, you know they’re purposely trying to dress like me because I dress like nothing.

Me and my friends made a group called 1400 and the number always stuck with me. I always see it everywhere I go. There’s an angel behind the number, it’s an angelic number.

I want you as a lemon the waiter brings on a tiny white plate. I want him to watch while I squeeze you into my mouth and swallow the rind.

The answers you are seeking are within you, its society that’s taught you to look outside yourself.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

Falling down ain’t falling down, If you don’t cry when you hit the floor, It’s called the past cause I’m getting past, And I ain’t nothing like I was before, You ought to see me now.

When I look at you, I see the moon – I wish you could see that you’re every poets muse.