"The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished."

"What is to be done about these literary people, who will never understand that painting is a craft and that the material side comes first? The ideas come afterwards, when the picture is finished."

"The modern architect is, generally speaking, art's greatest enemy."

"I have no rules and no methods... no secrets."

"It took me twenty years to discover painting: twenty years looking at nature, and above all, going to the Louvre."

"Do not think that it is possible to repeat another period."

"My concern has always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit."

"I have a predilection for painting that lends joyousness to a wall."

"To express himself well, the artist should be hidden... The trouble is that if an artist knows he has genius, he's done for. The only salvation is to work like a labourer, and not have delusions of grandeur."

"I've known painters who never did any good work because instead of painting their models they seduced them."

"Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you from being a genius."

"God, the king of artists, was clumsy."

"It is impossible to repeat in one period what was done in another.The pointof view isnotthesame, anymorethan are the tools, the ideals, the needs, or the painters' techniques.""God, the king of artists, was clumsy."

"An artist must eat sparingly and give up a normal way of life."

"The simplest subjects are the immortal ones."

"If the professional schools should succeed in producing skilled workers trained in the technique of their craft, nothing could be done with them if they had no ideal."

"Religion is everywhere. It is in the mind, in the heart, in the love you put into what you do."

"Berthe Morisot was a painter full of eighteenth-century delicacy and grace; in a word, the last elegant and 'feminine' artists since Fragonard."

"On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii... I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black - you can do anything with that palette."

"He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]"

"I've never let one day go by without painting, or at least without drawing."

"People will keep on taking them for theorists, when all they wanted was to paint in gay, bright colours, like the old masters."

"I have a horror of the word 'flesh', which has become so shopworn.Why not 'meat'whilethey're about it? What I like is skin, a young girl's skin that is pink and shows that she has a good circulation."

"Out-of-doors there is a greater variety of light than in the studio, where the light is always the same. But that is just the trouble; one is carried away by the light, and besides, one can't see what one is doing."