“It took me 40 years to find out that painting is not sculpture.”

The artist makes things concrete and gives them individuality.

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not really possible to help others.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

I advance all of my canvas at one time.

An art which isn’t based on feeling isn’t an art at all.

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

Here, on the river’s verge, I could be busy for months without changing my place, simply leaning a little more to right or left.

Don’t be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

I have to keep working, not to arrive at finish, which arouses the admiration of fools… I must seek completion only for the pleasure of being truer and more knowing.

Nature is more depth than surface, the colours are the expressions on the surface of this depth; they rise up from the roots of the world.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

You must think. The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.

Art first of all is optical. That’s where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.

To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.

All pictures painted inside in the studio will never be as good as the things done outside.

Get to the heart of what is before you and continue to express yourself as logically as possible.

We have to recognize that the world is not something sculptured and finished, which we as perceivers walk through like patrons in a museum; the world is something we make through the act of perception.

It is easy now to communicate with people through abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since the whole body reacts to its presence, people become themselves a living part of the whole.

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

The sculptor must search with passionate intensity for the underlying principle of the organisation of mass and tension – the meaning of gesture and the structure of rhythm.

I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality… to protect myself.

At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model.

Reserve the language of sculpture for the art of sculpture. Lest you confuse beauty with the shape of a jaw or art with the size of a stomach.

That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false.