Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists! One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming.

Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

It is all very well to copy what one sees, but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in one's memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do to-day. Otherwise, working is just a waste of time.

The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

It is peoples movement that consoles us. If the leaves of a tree did not move how sad would be the tree and so should we.

It is all very well to copy what one sees but it is far better to draw what one now only sees in ones memory. That is a transformation in which imagination collaborates with memory.

What a delightful thing is the conversation of specialists One understands absolutely nothing and its charming.

Art is not what you see but what you make others see.

Drawing is the artists most direct and spontaneous expression. A species of writing it reveals better than does painting his true personality.

Drawing is not the same as form it is a way of seeing form.

Drawing is not what one sees but what one can make others see.

The fascinating thing is not to show the source of light but the effect of light.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

The frame is the pimp of painting it enhances it but it must never shine at the paintings expense.

There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.

Realism is more important than the sentiment of the picture.

The craft of painting has virtually disappeared. There is hardly anyone left who really possesses it. For evidence one has only to look at the painters of this century.

I don't know if it was the whole audience getting stoned out of their minds getting ready for the Floyd thing or what it was, but it was like playing to a painting.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

I don't like painting flowers in my music. I like painting guts and pain.

Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

If the weather is good I go into the nearby wood - there I am painting a small beech forest (in the sun) with a few conifers mixed in. This takes until 8 'o clock.

The paintings may communicate even better because people are lazy and they can look at a painting with less effort than they can read a poem.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

When I was in art college, I would be painting, and I would create something on a canvas that was actually quite attractive. But if I got frightened and tried to protect that, that canvas would die.

My movement from painting to film was a very conscious one.

I believe that painting should come through the avenues of meditation rather than the canals of action.

For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Painting... in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subject and moves into the realm of the inevitable.

When we don't have information, we go to the simplest outlook, to black and white. But then we have to lie to ourselves. Black is never as black as you're painting it and white is never as white.

I was not out to paint beautiful pictures; even painting good pictures was not important to me. I wanted only to help the truth burst forth.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Painting is a hobby for me.

I'm a secretive bastard. I would never let anybody watch me painting... it would be like somebody watching you have sex - painting is that personal to me.

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Well, I am not interested in the kind of expression that you have when you paint a painting with brush strokes. It's all right, but it's already done and I want to do something new.

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.