“Painting is a language which cannot be replaced by another language. I don’t know what to say about what I paint, really.”

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 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.

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

Mastery of language affords one remarkable opportunities.

For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.

I die for speaking the language of the angels.

I analyse in my own way, in very simple, no-jargon language. If somebody is talking in very complicated way, I never like that.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

Music goes way back before language does. And music is like the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn’t even talk about. We know it’s there.