“Take clear water with grass waving at the bottom. It’s wonderful to look at, but to try to paint it is enough to make one insane.”

I still have a lot of pleasure doing them, but as time goes by I come to appreciate more clearly which paintings are good and which should be discarded.

Everything changes, even stone.

Light is the most important person in the picture.

I waited for the idea to consolidate, for the grouping and composition of themes to settle themselves in my brain.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Impressionism is only direct sensation. All great painters were less or more impressionists. It is mainly a question of instinct, and much simpler than [John Singer] Sargent thinks.

I still don’t know where I am going to sleep tomorrow.

When I look at nature I feel as if I’ll be able to paint it all, note it all down, and then you might as well forget it once you’re working.

Without the fog, London would not be a beautiful city. It is fog that gives it its magnificent amplitude its regular and massive blocks become grandiose in that mysterious mantle.

It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

The real subject of every painting is light.

For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at any moment.

My work is always better when I am alone and follow my own impressions.

When I work I forget all the rest.

Nature won’t be summoned to order and won’t be kept waiting. It must be caught, well caught.

Her heart was a gentle stroke of a paintbrush.

My mother was the most creative, fantastic person and would come up with great things for us to do. She’d buy art supplies and all of us would sit around painting. I was lucky.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, an poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

I’m quite arty. I didn’t know whether to become an artist or musician but I realised I could paint with music. All my songs have colours.

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

Color my life with the paint of your madness.