When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.

Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.

Creativity is that marvelous capacity to grasp mutually distinct realities and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.

Painting is neither decorative amusement, nor the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

The artist is a spectator, indifferent or impassioned, at the birth of his work, and observes the phases of its development.

I have never seen a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman. But you can take an ugly woman and make a beautiful painting of her. It is the painting itself that should be beautiful.

Before he goes into the water, a diver cannot know what he will bring back.

Collage is a supersensitive and scrupulously accurate instrument, similar to a seismograph, which is able to record the exact amount of the possibility of human happiness at any period.

The role of the painter . . . is to project that which sees itself in him.

Worry is heavy weight.

Love gives with its eyes closed

Trust is not hoping your partner will love you

Somewhere out there, a higherform of sadism won the first round.Well, screw that. I'm not ready to bepwned.

Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships for transit has a way of making everything clear.

I stopped taking drugs when I was 19, and who wants to drive a cab around New York with drugs in their car?

Unrequited love is as different from the mutual love as the error from the truth.

I've always gone for a kind of perfection. In the end, it's so much better to get the feeling of, "Wow, she's so perfect," from a doll than to have to bear that from a woman in a magazine.

I think pure light has something to do with actually seeing everything at once. It's kind of a nirvana of sorts.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.