For me, a picture should be like sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem. It must have radiance; it must be like those stones which Pyrenean shepherds use to light their pipes.

I feel the need of attaining the maximum of intensity with the minimum of means. It is this which has led me to give my painting a character of even greater bareness.

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.

The more I work, the more I want to work.

My way is to seize an image the moment it has formed in my mind, to trap it as a bird and to pin it at once to canvas. Afterward I start to tame it, to master it. I bring it under control and I develop it.

I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself... That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time.

A modeled form is less striking than one which is not. Modeling prevents shock and limits movement to the visual depth. Without modeling or chiaroscuro depth is limitless: movement can stretch to infinity.

My tendency towards bareness and simplification has been practiced in three fields: modeling, colors, and the figuration of the personages.

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

I begin painting and as I paint the picture begins to assert itself, or suggest itself, under my brush. The form becomes a sign for a woman or a bird as I work... The first stage is free, unconscious... the second stage is carefully calculated.

As regards my means of expression, I try my hardest to achieve the maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness; a physical sensation to begin with, followed up by an impact on the psyche.

The more ignoble I find life, the more strongly I react by contradiction, in humour and in an outburst of liberty and expansion.

Painting or poetry is made as one makes love -- a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

I work like a gardener.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

For me, a painting must give off sparks. It must dazzle like the beauty of a woman or a poem.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things.