Fine art is that in which the hand, the head and the heart go together.

When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece.

...that horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and ... he does it without destroying something else.

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in lovemaking. Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.

Until I saw Chardin's paintings, I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parents' house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.