The artist is obliged to invent the self who will paint his pictures.

Every artist who creates intense depictions of his own problems, which he believes not only to be important to him, but also to others, needs to use himself.

The need to be a great artist makes it hard to be an artist. The need to produce a great work of art makes it hard to produce any art at all.

Do you know what I have been involuntarily thinking, that in the first period of an artist’s life, one unconsciously makes it very hard for oneself – by a feeling of not being able to master the work – by an uncertainty as to whether one will ever master it – by a great ambition to make progress, but a lack of self-confidence – one cannot banish a certain feeling of agitation, and one hurries oneself though one doesn’t like to be hurried . . .
This cannot be helped, and it is a time which one must go through, and which in my opinion cannot and should not be otherwise.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his picture.

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

A man is born an artist as a hippopotamus is born a hippopotamus; and you can no more make yourself one than you can make yourself a giraffe.

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.

The price an artist pays for doing what he wants is that he has to do it.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Clearly the hardest thing for the working artist is to create his own conception and follow it, unafraid of the strictures it imposes, however rigid these may be... I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.

All artists give birth. It's alchemy and it's really an amazing process.

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

The artist is the only one who detaches himself from life, opposes his personality against it, he is the only one who orders things as he wishes them to be in place of things as they are. Thus for him life is not a fait accompli, it is something to remake, to do again. He takes possession of his gifts in order to continue, to change, He makes his choice, it is he who creates the conceptions of beautiful and ugly, those are the things to preserve, the things to change. At the seat of the things that it is necessary to change he puts his desires, his aspirations, in one word, his personality...