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

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.

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

I did gardening and cooking and drawing and reading to try take the pressure off the music – just being eclectic and putting the fun back in and bringing more innocence in again is really important.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it’s very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.

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

Don’t leave inferences to be drawn when evidence can be presented.

All my drawings always sort of looked funny even if I was trying to do serious stuff and express myself about grim situations. It was always cartoony.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.