“.. human faces are for me only suggestions to see something else in them – the life of colour, seized with a lover's passion.”

“Light, colour, love - let me come under your spell. Life can be represented only by a lively kind of painting. There is clarity in passion.”

“There are books… which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.”

“A good lover will do that, see something worthwhile in you that you never knew was there. And when there's something you don't like to see in yourself a good lover won't see it either.”

“That someday there will be no them and us. There will be no colour and no differences between us. There will be only one human family working together.”

“My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love. The one is about you, the other about someone else.”

“Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.”

“If you're trying to turn me into something else? It's easy to see, I'm not down with that.”

“There are moments in your life when you see yourself through someone else’s eyes, when your only hope of believing you’re capable of doing something is because someone else believes it for you.”

“What interests me most is neither still life nor landscape but the human figure. It is through it that I best succeed in expressing the nearly religious feeling that I have towards life. I do not insist upon the details of the face. I do not care to repeat them with anatomical exactness. Though I happen to have an Italian model whose appearance at first suggests nothing but a purely animal existence, yet I succeed in picking out among the lines of his face those which suggest that deep gravity which persists in every human being.”