I don't know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can't do what I want to do.

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.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!

In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.