Instinct must be thwarted just as one prunes the branches of a tree so that it will grow better. - Henri Matisse

Dessiner avec les ciseaux: découper à vif dans la couleur me rappelle la taille directe des sculpteurs.

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naiveté. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say.