Disciples be damned. It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider‘s web.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Every positive value has its price in negative terms… the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite – that particular peach is but a detail.

When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it.

Without great solitude no serious work is possible.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

One must act in painting as in life, directly.

Never copy yourself, always copy someone else.

An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.

Work is a necessity for man. Man invented the alarm clock.

If all the ways I have been along were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur.

To copy others is necessary, but to copy oneself is pathetic.

Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

The more technique you have, the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is, the less there is.

To make oneself hated is more difficult than to make oneself loved.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

The genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

Love is the greatest refreshment in life.

We don’t grow older, we grow riper.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero.

The world today doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

Action is the foundational key to all success.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.