- When I was a child, my mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general. If you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
- Good taste is the enemy of creativity.
- Everyone wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of the birds?
- Good artists borrow, great artists steal.
- It isn't necessary to paint a man with a gun. An apple can be just as revolutionary.
- You should have an idea of what it is you want to do . . . but it should be a vague idea.
- Many people say they don't like my art because they don't understand it. Well, I don't understand Chinese, but that doesn't mean I don't like it.
- Give me a museum and I'll fill it.
- The genius of [Albert Einstein] leads to Hiroshima.
- Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog and I pointed out that it was really a typewriter.
- [reportedly his last words] Drink to me. Drink to my health. You know I can't drink anymore.
- There are painters who transform the sun into a yellow spot, but there are others who - thanks to their art and intelligence - transform a yellow spot into the sun.
- I'm always doing things I've never done before, that's how I get to do them.
- Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
- I can paint false Picassos as well as anybody.
- Academic training in beauty is a sham. When we love a woman, we don't start measuring her limbs... Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of birds? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But where art is concerned people [think they] must understand.
- [from 'Cahiers of Art' (1935) In the old days, pictures advanced toward their completion by stages. Every day brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions: I make a picture, then I destroy it...A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes, as one's thoughts change. And when it is finished is still goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. A picture lives only through the person who is looking at it.
- [Painting a cartoon face over Gertrude Stein's Portrait] She won't notice the difference.
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