“To create is divine, to reproduce is human.”

I paint what cannot be photographed, something from the imagination. I photograph the things I don’t want to paint, things that are already in existence.

If I’d had the nerve, I’d have become a thief or a gangster, but since I didn’t, I became a photographer.

The tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.

Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.

I am not going to be dictated to by the size of the camera. I use everything from an 8 x 10 to a 35-mm. But I don’t use these modern cameras which break down all the time !

l photograph what l do not wish to paint and l paint that which l cannot photograph.

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.

An original is a creation motivated by desire.

I paint when I cannot photograph.

I have never painted a recent picture.

I have been accused of being a joker. But the most successful art to me involves humor.

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.

Oh, yes, I was a great retoucher. A retoucher is an esthetic surgeon !

I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions.

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.

The social relations which are the basis of the reproduction of the species are founded upon the continuous union of parents in marriage.

The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.

All their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.

The haiku reproduces the designating gesture of the child pointing at whatever it is (the haiku shows no partiality for the subject), merely saying: that!

You’re basically the sum of all the experiences you’ve ever had, and they’re sort of shaken up in you and reproduced in the things you create, and that includes seeing movies.

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially.

In the first place the family provides society with an orderly means of reproduction,

It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.