I need to work to feel well.

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.

Every new painting is like throwing myself into the water without knowing how to swim.

You would hardly believe how difficult it is to place a figure alone on a canvas, and to concentrate all the interest on this single and universal figure and still keep it living and real.

I paint what I see and not what others like to see.

There is no symmetry in nature. One eye is never exactly the same as the other.

There is only one true thing: Instantly paint what you see.

Who is this Monet whose name sounds just like mine and who is taking advantage of my notoriety?

Conciseness in art is essential and a refinement. The concise man makes one think; the verbose bores. Always work towards conciseness.

Insults are pouring down on me as thick as hail.

...looking up at the stars, he had accepted life as a medium for action. Something to wield like a tool. One’s own life: an instrument for the shaping of the world.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

I answered that one learns to live, not by hearing of other lives, but by living; for words are infinitely less important than acts.

When those who have the opportunity to speak to those politicians they must do so and if one doesn't have that opportunity to speak directly, they can still speak indirectly and it can be heard.

It is odd there are many movies with many men. But generally movies have one woman, or maybe the older woman and the younger girl.

Some, merely to contradict what I had said, did not scruple to cast doubt upon things they had seen with their own eyes again and again.

It's still an escape for me, painting, so it also takes me elsewhere. I don't think I would do it otherwise.

We've got to get rid of the fear of failure in this country. In America, people start things, fail and shake themselves down and start things again. The animal spirit of capitalism is stronger there.

If I could finance my own movies, I would be doing it.

There is such a delusion as evinces itself in cool vehemence; and it is the most dangerous of all expressions of fanaticism.