“There comes a moment in every person’s life when they realise they adore me.”

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images.

Man cannot change or escape his time. The eye sees the present and the future.

The connoisseur does not drink wine but tastes its secrets.

It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.

What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

If I’m going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!

An elegant woman is a woman who despises you and has no hair under her arms.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

Repulsion is the sentry that guards the gate to all that we most desire.

Physiological expenditure is a superficial way of self-expression. People who incline toward physical love accomplish nothing at all.

The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.

Anything that does not take place erotically sublimates itself in the work of art.

When we are asleep in this world, we are awake in another.