“Knowledge of the means to express our emotion is essential- and is acquired only after a very long experience.”

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.

The landscape becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture…we merge in an iridescent chaos.

Optics, developing in us through study, teach us to see.

Under this fine rain I breathe in the innocence of the world. I feel coloured by the nuances of infinity. At this moment I am one with my picture. We are an iridescent chaos.

Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.

I want to die painting.

Keep good company – that is, go to the Louvre.

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.

There is no light painting or dark painting, but simply relations of tones.

We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.

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.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.