“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.”

If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color?

In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.

All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces… So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.

In the past I have never thought about loneliness when working, and I don’t think about it now. Yet there must be a reason for the fact that so many people talk about it.

If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won’t know what it is until I succeed in doing 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.

My humor was kind of from my dad and all the stuff that we went through, which was a lot of death. My humor was an escape.

How we choose to combat that challenge is often life-defining. You can face difficulties head-on, or run from them, or ignore them until they consume you. But no one escapes conflict. No one.

Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.

I’ve got to sleep. Sleep is my only way to escape.

You’re trying to escape from your difficulties, and there never is any escape from difficulties, never. They have to be faced and fought.

The purpose of Jesus’s coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it.

Young people don’t always do what they’re told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment.

A writer’s style reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacites, his bias…it is the Self escaping into the open.