I happen to have been born a Cartesian. The French education is based on a sequence of strict logic. You carry it with you.

The curious thing about the Ready-Made is that I've never been able to arrive at a definition or explanation that fully satisfies me. There's still magic in the idea, so I'd rather keep it that way than try to be exoteric about it.

What would I do with money? I have enough for my needs. I don't want any more. If I had a lot, I would have to care for it, worry about it.

One is a painter because one wants so-called freedom; one doesn't want to go to the office every morning.

I really had no program or any established plan. I didn't even ask myself if I should sell my paintings or not.

In chess, there are some extremely beautiful things in the domain of movement, but not in the visual domain. It's the imagining of the movement or of the gesture that makes the beauty in this case.

I didn't abandon everything at a moment's notice - on the contrary. I returned to France from America, leaving the 'Large Glass' unfinished.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

I became a librarian at the Sainte-Genevieve Library in Paris. I made this gesture to rid myself of a certain milieu, a certain attitude, to have a clean conscience, but also to make a living. I was twenty-five. I had been told that one must make a living, and I believed it.

I shy away from the word 'creation.' In the ordinary, social meaning of the word - well, it's very nice, but fundamentally, I don't believe in the creative function of the artist. He's a man like any other.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

Living is more a question of what one spends than what one makes.

Chess can be described as the movement of pieces eating one another.

The individual - man as a man, man as a brain, if you like - interests me more than what he makes because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves.

I'm nothing else but an artist, I'm sure, and delighted to be.

Art is all a matter of personality.

Art doesn't interest me. Only artists interest me.

For me, the 'Three Stoppages' was a first gesture liberating me from the past.

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

In the beginning, the cubists broke up form without even knowing they were doing it. Probably the compulsion to show multiple sides of an object forced us to break the object up - or, even better, to project a panorama that unfolded different facets of the same object.

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead - and that America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she does on European traditions!

The danger is in pleasing an immediate public: the immediate public that comes around you and takes you in and accepts you and gives you success and everything. Instead of that, you should wait for fifty years or a hundred years for your true public. That is the only public that interests me.

All painting, beginning with Impressionism, is antiscientific, even Seurat. I was interested in introducing the precise and exact aspect of science, which hadn't often been done, or at least hadn't been talked about very much.

There does not exist a painter who knows himself or knows what he is doing.