Good painting is like good cooking; it can be tasted, but not explained.

I knew neither jealousy nor hate but was possessed by a rage to recreate a new world, the world which my eyes perceived, a world all to myself. I was poor but I knew that life is beautiful.

I was poor but I knew that life is beautiful. And I had no other ambition than to discover with the help of new means those deep inner ties that linked me to the very soil.

I was a barbarian, tender and full of violence. I translated by instinct, without any method, not merely an artistic truth but above all a human one.

When I get my hands on painting materials I don't give a damn about other people's painting... every generation must start again afresh.

When I had spent a few days without thinking, without doing anything, I would feel a sudden urge to paint. Then I would set up my easel in full sunshine.

I seem initially to have followed Fauvism, and then to have followed in Cézanne's footsteps. Whatever - I do not mind... as long as first of all I remained Vlaminck.

When I work I always find something.

Only the series of colors on the canvas with all their power and vibrancy could, in combination with each other, render the chromatic feeling of that landscape.

In art, theories are as useful as a doctor's prescription; one must be sick to believe them.

Our real duty is always found running in the direction of our worthiest desires.

Man hurts man, time and time again. As we drown in the wake of our power, somebody tell me why?

I believe in manicures. I believe in overdressing. I believe in primping at leisure and wearing lipsitck.

To those who had ordered them to death, one of them said: “We die because the people are asleep and you will die because the people will awaken.”

Pleasure and pain are the only springs of action in man, and always will be.

When all the arguments have been forgotten, this central fact will remain. The two nations fought a single war, and their quarrels were the quarrels of brothers.

I carry thoughts of you like my own personal constellation. How far away you are, my dearest friend, but no farther than those fixed stars in my soul.

I feel very much ideologically, politically if you like, and emotionally part of the European cinema.

Who knew Lenny was an encyclopedia for useless information?

It is so easy to be wrong-and to persist in being wrong-when the costs of being wrong are paid by others.