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

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.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

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.

Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another.

We cannot do everything at once but we can do something at once.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.

Emotional maturity is the ability to stick to a job and to struggle through until it is finished, to endure unpleasantness, discomfort and frustration.

A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.

Music is like making love: either all or nothing.

You know, I eat, I ate pretty well anyway so, I'm basically living the same, I just curtailed the stupidity.

Respect your uniqueness, and drop comparison. Relax into your being.

Accursed who brings to light of day the writings I have cast away.