Pablo Picasso Quotes

I deal with painting as I deal with things, I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If an open window looks wrong in a picture, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. In painting, as in life, you must act directly.

If I don't have red, I use blue.

Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink any more.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

The painter goes through states of fullness and evacuation. That is the whole secret of art. I go for a walk in the forest of Fontainebleau. I get 'green' indigestion. I must get rid of this sensation into a picture. Green rules it. A painter paints to unload himself of feelings and visions. People seize on painting to cover up their nakedness. They get what they can wherever they can. In the end I don't believe they get anything at all. They've simply cut a coat to the measure of their own ignorance. They make everything, from God to a picture, in their own image. That is why the picture-hook is the ruination of a painting. [Boisgeloup, winter 1934].

Les bons artistes empruntent, les grands artistes volent.

Painting is not made to decorate apartments. It's an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.
(about Guernica).

Learn the rules like a pro,
So you can break them like an artist.

When Matisse died, he left me his Odalisques 'as a legacy', he proclaimed.

They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting. I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art. Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not. Velasquez left us his idea of the people of his epoch. Undoubtedly they were different from what he painted them, but we cannot conceive a Philip IV in any other way than the one Velasquez painted... [Paris 1923].

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

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today that it ever was.

La pintura no se ha inventado para adornar las habitaciones. La pintura es un arma ofensiva, en la defensa contra el enemigo.

For me, there are two kinds of women — goddesses and doormats.