And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.

I went to the Academy and studied with Stuck who was then a big man. But didn't interest me. I didn't know that before me there was Kandinsky and Klee who had also studied with Stuck. He had a good name at that time.

I count all the time on resonance. I call on this, you see.

When I came from horizontal vertical straight all old stuff then suddenly I go also again in curved lines. And there I submit to changes in the intensity of my hand leading a tool, you see.

I think Kandinsky and I were very near friends.

If you don't do it my way, I suggest you commit suicide.

It was my family that wanted me to be a teacher. That was safe, you see. To be a painter was terrible.

My father's parents were carpenters. They were also builders partly. They were painters. And several of them were very, active in the theatre and all such nonsense, you know.

Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

I prefer to see with closed eyes.

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

Apprentice is the beginner - the first years you work in a craft in the European sense you are an apprentice. That takes 3 or 4 years. Then you are a journeyman. You can go from one master to another and learn other tricks and other secrets.

On the little money I had collected I lived in Berlin very cheaply, ate very cheaply. And already in 1920 I saved the first salaries I received to go to Munich.

When we are honest - that's my saying - if we are honest then we will reveal ourselves. But we do not have to make an effort to be individualistic, different from others.

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

When we were in the seminary we got a stipend direct from the government and for that stipend we had an obligation to stick to our teaching job for five years.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

I have taught my students not to apply rules or mechanical ways of seeing.

It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see.

In Italy the artist is a god. Now if the artist is a god, the scientist is likewise a god.

You see, I have in my teaching - I always say I've done it for a hundred years and have had thousands of students - I have always spoken against just falling onto your knees for so-called accidents, I mean a result you are not responsible for.

I was for years in the yellow period, you know.

As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.

I love very much to draw animals.

And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.

I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.

I'm not a talker. I'm a formulator.

The aim of our studies is to prove that color is the most relative means of artistic expression, that we never really perceive what color is physically.

I have invented the Thermometer style.

Abstraction is real, probably more real than nature.

Easy to know that diamonds are precious Good to learn that rubies have depth But more to see that pebbles are miraculous.

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.

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.