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

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.

Forgetfulness of self is remembrance of God.

That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things is called delusion; that the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self is called enlightenment.

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Without self-respect there can be no genuine success. Success won at the cost of self-respect is not success ? for what shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own self-respect.

Apocalypse can mean the unveiling of the deeper self of humanity.

The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

I bear witness, O my God, that Thou hast created me to know Thee and to worship Thee. I testify, at this moment, to my powerlessness and to Thy might, to my poverty and to Thy wealth. There is none other God but Thee, the Help in Peril, the Self-Subsisting.

Discover that we are capable of solitary joy and having experienced it, know that we have touched the core of self.