583 Quotes by Pablo Picasso

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don’t we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

The only thing that’s important is the legend created by the picture, and not whether it continues to exist itself.

Even if the painting is green, well then! The ‘subject’ is the green. There is always a subject; it’s a joke to suppress the subject, it’s impossible.

I am exhausted if I don’t work.

Braque always said that the only thing that counts, in painting, is the intention, and it’s true. What counts is what one wants to do, and not what one does. That’s what’s important.

You mustn’t always believe what I say. Questions tempt you to tell lies, particularly when there is no answer.

Imitators? All right! Disciples if you like. But disciples be damned. It’s not interesting.

Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it’s a form of magic designed as mediator between this strange hostile world and us.

It isn’t up to the painter to define the symbols. Otherwise it would be better if he wrote them out in so many words! The public who look at the picture must interpret the symbols as they understand them.