A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

Oil-painting is a developed technique. Why go backwards?

Youth must go ahead and prosper. These young painters are all very talented people, but they all paint frescoes.

Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

One can easily tell that the creator of the paintings in the Sistine Chapel was above all a sculptor.

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

The colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

It was always my intention that The Frieze should be housed in a room which would provide a suitable architectural frame for it.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder.

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose.

The rich man who gives, steals twice over. First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.

A work of art comes only from inside a human being.

My breakthrough came very late in life really only starting when I was 50...I had the strength for new deeds and ideas.

Colors live a remarkable life of their own after they have been applied to the canvas.

Photography is an art which touches and grips one's own heart's blood.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland's history in their lineaments trace; think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

When you do portraits professionally it's not a desire, it's for money.

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I'm a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening - figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.

I wanted to translate from one flat surface to another. In fact, my learning disabilities controlled a lot of things. I don't recognize faces, so I'm sure it's what drove me to portraits in the first place.

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor's office was full of portraits by Picasso.

When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

I do house things. I paint. I do portraits. I also paint my house.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.