Let's not eliminate nature. Too bad if we fail. You see, in his 'Dejeuner sur l'herbe', Manet ought to have added - I don't know what - a touch of th… - Paul Cézanne

That's my great ambition. To be sure! Every time I attack a canvas I feel convinced, I believe that something's going to come of it.. .But I immediately remember that I've always failed before. Then I taste blood.. .I never know where I am going or where I want to go with this damned profession. All the theories mess you up inside.

A builder. A rough and ready plasterer. A colour grinder. He Courbet is like a Roman bricklayer. And yet he's another true painter. There's no one in this century that surpasses him. Even though he rolls up his sleeves, plugs up his ears, demolishes columns, his workmanship is classical!.. .His view was always compositional. His vision remained traditional. Like his palette-knife, he used it only out of doors. He was sophisticated and brought his work to a high finish.. .His great contribution is the poetic introduction of nature - the smell of damp leaves, mossy forest cuttings - into nineteenth century painting; the murmur of rain, woodlands shadows, sunlight moving under trees. The sea. And snow, he painted snow like no one else!

This will be my picture, the one I shall leave behind.. .But the center? Where is the center? I can't find the center.. .Tell me, what shall I group it all around? Ah, Poussin's arabesque! He knew all about that. In the London 'Bacchanal', in the Louvre 'Flora' (both are paintings of Poussin, admired by Cézanne), where does the line of the figures and the landscape begin, where does it finish.. ..It's all one. There is no center. Personally I would like something like a hole, a ray of light, an invisible sun to keep an eye on my figures, to bathe them, care them, intensify them.. ..in the middle [remark on one of his paintings ['The Bathers]']