"Delacroix spoke of the Greek coin being built from the center out. Vermeer has painted in this way, according to the principles of mass.. .How beautifully they are drawn – Vermeer does not just make a leaf and place it in the design, he relates space and leaf. . That drapery – it is abstract – observe how this shape curves around the center space while the tree counter-curves opposite it, cutting an egg shape.. ..the spaces on the carpet that carry no figuration are, in fact, shapes of vital importance in building the whole.."

“I was with Cézanne for a long time, and now naturally I am with Picasso”

“Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.”

“It would be a sad thing for an artist if he knew how to paint. – so sad. An artist paints because it is a challenge to him – it is like trying to twist the devil. If you overcome it, there is no sport left. I don't even like to talk about painting. It is impossible to talk about painting because I don't know what it is. If I knew what it was I would get out a patent and then no one else would be able to paint.”

“I like the heat the tenderness the edible the lusciousness the song of a single person the bathtub full of water to bathe myself beneath the water. I like Ucello, Grunewald, Ingres, the drawings and sketches for paintings of Seurat and that man . I measure all things by weight.”

“..poor art for poor people”

“Rimbaud has epitomized for me the true function of the artist when he wrote: 'The poet should define the quantity of the unknown which awakes in his time, in the universal soul. He should give more than the formula of his thought, than the annotation of his march toward progress. The enormous becoming the normal, when absorbed by everyone, he would really be a multiplication of progress.'”