Painting is damned difficult - you always think you've got it, but you haven't.

When I start thinking, all is lost.

The landscape becomes human, becomes a thinking, living being within me. I become one with my picture...we merge in an iridescent chaos.

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.

People think how a sugar basin has no physiognomy, no soul. But it changes every day.

It is impossible for emotion not to come on us in thinking of that time now flowed away.

Tell me, do you think I'm going mad? I sometimes wonder, you know.

If I think, everything is lost.

Here on the edge of the river, the motifs are very plentiful, the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study of the highest interest and so varied that I think I could be occupied for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right or left.