Pablo Picasso Quotes

Everyone wants to understand painting. Why don't they try to understand the song of the birds? Why do they love a night, a flower, everything which surrounds man, without attempting to understand them? Whereas where painting is concerned, they want to understand. Let them understand above all that the artist works from necessity; that he, too, is a minute element of the world to whom one should ascribe no more importance than so many things in nature which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who attempt to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time. Gertrude Stein, overjoyed, told me some time ago that she had finally understood what my picture represented: three musicians. It was a still life!! [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].

Go and do the things you can’t. That is how you get to do them.

"You mustn't alway believe what I say", he once told me. "Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer."

When I was a child my mother said to me, 'If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.' Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

Todos los niños nacen artistas. El problema es cómo seguir siendo artista cuando creces.

We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years. (Upon exiting the Lascaux cave, France)

Their forms had no more influence on me than they did on Matisse. Or Derain. But for them, the masks were sculptures like all others. When Matisse showed me his first African head, he spoke to me of Egyptian art.

The more technique you have the less you have to worry about it. The more technique there is the less there is.

I am a woman. Every artist is a woman and should have a taste for other women. Artists who are homosexual cannot be true artists because they like men, and since they themselves are women they are reverting to normality.

Impara le regole come un professionista, in modo da poterle rompere come un artista.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Learn the rule like a pro so you can break them like an artist.

L'art lave notre âme de la poussière du quotidien.

The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.

If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!