Action is the foundational key to all success.
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought.
Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.
Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.
Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.
Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.
Everything is a miracle. It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one’s bath like a lump of sugar.
Everything you can imagine is real.
He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t. This is an inexorable, indisputable law.
I do not seek. I find.
I don’t believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents.
I don’t say everything, but I paint everything.
I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
If there is something to steal, I steal it!.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not
Painting is stronger than me, it makes me do its bidding.
People want to find a ‘meaning’ in everything and everyone. That’s the disease of our age, an age that is anything but practical but believes itself to be more practical than any other age.
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility.
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.
When I was a child my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll be the pope.’ Instead I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
When we discovered Cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering Cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.
