When Picasso does pure painting he is a great artist. When he paints as an cubist, putting one tone next to another, the arrangement of planes is fin… - Aristide Maillol

We should try to return to our youth, to work naively; this is what I see, and it is why I have such success, because our century has tried to return to the primitive. I work as if no art had ever been made, before me, as if I had never learned anything. I am the first man to do sculpture.

Negro art contains more ideas than Greek art. Its strange inventiveness of form is astonishing, and its imagination and extraordinary sense of decoration are difficult to explain. We dare not take such liberties; but the Negroes have succeeded. We are too much the subjects of our own past..

My sculpture is altogether different from Rodin’s.. ..In sculpture he [Rodin] always sees the flesh first. [answering his critics]