Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?

+ Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love.

+ I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.

+ The habit of ignoring Nature is deeply implanted in our times. This attitude reminds me of people who never look you in the ye; I find them disturbing and always have to look away.

+ If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.

+ Changes in societal structure and in art would possess more credibility if they had their origins in the soul and spirit. If people read the words of the prophets with closer attention, they would find the keys to life.

+ My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life.

+ In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

+ My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.

+ But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures.

+ Great art picks up where nature ends.

• It’s all a big game of construction, some with a brush, some with a shovel, some choose a pen.
• The method of painting is the natural growth out of a need. I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.
• It doesn’t matter how the paint is put on, as long as something is said.
• On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.
• The modern artist is working with space and time and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.
• When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about.
• The painting has a life of its own.
• Every good painter paints what he is.

+ Whether I’m painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I’m not working, I’m still analyzing people.

+ I thought you had to give up a lot for art, and you did. It required complete concentration. It also required that whatever money you had had to be put into art materials.

+ You can’t leave humanity out. If you didn’t have humanity, you wouldn’t have anything.

+ You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you have, the better it is.. unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far.

+ The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a by-product of making something that means something. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

+ You know what hip-hop has done with the word ‘nigger’ – I’m trying to do that with the word vandalism, bring it back.

+ The holy grail is to spend less time making the picture than it takes people to look at it.

+ I wouldn’t sell shit to Charles Saatchi. If I sell 55,000 books and however many screen prints, I don’t need one man to tell me I’m an artist. It’s hugely different if people buy it, rather than one f##king Tory punter does. No, I’d never knowingly sell anything to him.

+ If you don’t own a train company then you go and paint on one instead. It all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something.. that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it.

+ Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.

+ Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.

+ Art is never chaste. It ought to be forbidden to ignorant innocents, never allowed into contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes, art is dangerous. Where it is chaste, it is not art.

+ The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.

+ Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself

+ I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.

+ They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

+ I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.

+ I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.

+ Really I do not know whether my paintings are surrealist or not, but I do know that they are the frankest expression of myself.

+ I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.