One must respect black, nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism.

I venerate with emotion everything that comes from the heart when it is simple, silent and confident. It is a sensual pleasure, subtle and touching, to try to reach characters through the varied outer appearances of human conditions.

I am certain about what I will never do – but not about what my art will render.

Nobody will enter into your hopes: dreams, desires, projects are weak and solitary abstractions that nobody will formulate with us. In his aspirations toward the future or beyond it, man is unhappy because he is alone, all that he sees, all that he is, makes him suffer, except for what he loves. If I ahd a son to direct, I would tell him: ‘Leave, go alone in the midst of men since you must become one of them. The individual soars only in liberty.

It is nature also who orders us to obey the gifts she has given us. Mine have led me to dreams; I submitted to the torments of imagination and the surprises she gave me under my pencil; but I directed and led those surprises in accordance with the laws of the organism of art which I know, which I feel, with the single goal of producing in the spectator, by sudden attraction, the whole evocation, and the whole enticement of the uncertain within the confines of thought.

It is difficult to judge one’s contemporaries; perhaps it is impossible to understand them.

Black is the most essential of all colors. Above all, if I may say so, it draws its excitement and vitality from deep and secret sources of health... One must admire black. Nothing can debauch it.

When I am alone, I love the wide roads. There, I have conversations with myself. My free steps move easily and my body leaves my spirit free of obstacles; it discourses, it reasons, it presses me with questions.

I have a feeling only for shadows.

True art lies in a reality that is felt.