Jean Dubuffet

"I have observed that very often I gain access to a little secret that I have sought for a long time by way of a fortuitous encounter quite unrelated to the matter: for example six months I try to draw…"

"I have always directed my attempts at the figurative representation of objects by way of summary and not very descriptive brushstrokes, diverging greatly from the real objective measurements of things…"

"For three years I studied very assiduously an Arabic dialect spoken by the Bedouins of the Sahara, and I began by writing this language phonetically in Latin characters; the very strange appearance of…"

"What seems interesting to me is to reproduce in the figurative representation of an object the whole complex system of impressions we receive in the normal course of everyday life, the way this affect…"

"What interests me about thoughts is not the moment when it crystallizes into formal ideas but its earlier stages."

"It pleased me to juxtapose brutally, in these feminine bodies, the extremely general and the extremely particular, the metaphysical and the grotesque trivial. In my view, the one is considerably reinf…"

"Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom."

"The Occidental man is not so bad.. .Not bad at all, the brave Aryan .. .I'm not unhappy to be living with him again.. ..one need not go outside of Europe in order to find truly "savage" individuals.. …"