The one thing that fills me with enthusiasm is to try, despite everything, to get nearer to those visions that seem so hard to express.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.

When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

Never judge someone by their relatives.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

Failure is the new success.

Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.

The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.

Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.

Keep those who truly love you close at all times.

No time in history has the Church of Jesus Christ gone down!

The strange thing about the English character is that they understate everything. It's considered bad form to comment on the food, money, romance, any of those things. So you underplay it.

What I still ask for daily-for life as long as I have work to do, and work as long as I have life.