“I don’t see why it’s impossible to express everything that’s on one’s mind.”

In my case there was no first love. I began with the second.

Nothing is worse and more hurtful than a happiness that comes too late. It can give no pleasure, yet it deprives you of that most precious of rights – the right to swear and curse at your fate!

Illness isn’t the only thing that spoils the appetite.

Nature is not a temple, but a workshop, and man’s the workman in it.

Nature cares nothing for logic, our human logic: she has her own, which we do not recognize and do not acknowledge until we are crushed under its wheel.

The fact is that previously they were simply dunces and now they’ve suddenly become nihilists.

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?

Sternly, remorselessly, fate guides each of us; only at the beginning, when we’re absorbed in details, in all sorts of nonsense, in ourselves, are we unaware of its harsh hand.

Take what you can yourself, and don’t let others get you into their hands; to belong to oneself, that is the whole thing in life.

I agree with no one’s opinion. I have some of my own.

Don’t force me into saying what I don’t want to say, and what I won’t say.

A son is like a lopped off branch. As a falcon he comes when he wills and goes where he lists.

Death’s an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.

What did I hope for, what did I expect, what rich future did I foresee, when the phantom of my first love, rising up for an instant, barely called forth one sigh, one mournful sentiment?

Most people can’t understand how others can blow their noses differently than they do.

However much you knock at nature’s door, she will never answer you in comprehensible words.

I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.

My way of expression is full of complications and mystery because that’s my perception of life.

The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.

The only other things I got from the abstract expressionists is the absolute belief that this canvas is the complete total area of struggle, this is the arena, this is where the fight is taking place, the battle.

I’m actually kind of angriest about the fact that everybody keeps saying how angry I am.

It is no longer a matter of expressing reality, but of expressing what one feels about reality.

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

The sciences throw an inexpressible grace over our compositions, even where they are not immediately concerned; as their effects are discernible where we least expect to find them.