"-last words about painting, age 78... I think I'm beginning to learn something about it."

"I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn't turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it."

"Paint with joy - with the same joy that you would make love to a woman."

"Why should beauty be suspect?"

"There are quite enough unpleasant things in life without the need to manufacture more."

"I look at a nude. There are myriads of tiny tints. I must find the ones that will make the flesh on my canvas live and quiver."

"I need to feel the excitement of life stirring around me, and I will always need to feel that."

"If you paint the leaf on a tree without using a model, your imagination will only supply you with a few leaves; but Nature offers you millions, all on the same tree. No two leaves are exactly the same. The artist who paints only what is in his mind must very soon repeat himself."

"The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion."

"Photography freed painting from a lot of tiresome chores, starting with family portraits."

"I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters."

"When I've painted a woman's bottom so that I want to touch it, then [the painting] is finished."

"I like a painting which makes me want to stroll in it."

"I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black."

"What seems most significant to me about our movement is that we have freed painting from the importance of the subject. I am at liberty to paint flowers and call them flowers, without their needing to tell a story."

"Regularity, order, desire for perfection destroy art. Irregularity is the basis of all art."

"Work lovingly done is the secret of all order and all happiness."

"One morning, one of us ran out of the black, it was the birth of Impressionism."

"Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world."

"Why shouldn’t art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world."

"The pain passes, but the beauty remains."

"To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them."

"France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme."

There were various turning points, but the main one at the beginning was that I was going off to do another degree in the history of art. I would have ended up as some art historian at Sotheby's or something.