The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.

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.

The only way we succeed as a group is not simply following directions, but in keeping each other accountable for our actions.

I have never known the time when I did not wear stays. My stays are part of me.

Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance.

In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

Hippies are so phoney and fake.

I suppose when I started out I would have liked to have been the darling of critics or something, but everybody wants to be loved and admired.

There's a story behind everything..but behind all your stories is always your mother's story..because hers is where yours begins.

Without seeing the origin of light, the true form of one's Self, the ordinary man sees by the mind different things and is deluded.

Sometimes you think certain details are things that only you would notice, so it's a great thing to feel like you're not by yourself and people understand where you're coming from.