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.

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.

A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.