All my work has an umbilicus
that attaches it to life.
Henry Moore

We know now that art
is not the truth.
It is a lie which permits us
to...glimpse the truth.
Picasso

If I can make black and white
behave together instead of
shooting at each other, I feel proud.
Josef Albers

I am a lie which always tells the truth.
Jean Cocteau

Every portrait that is painted with feeling
is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.
It is not he who is revealed by the painter;
it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas,
reveals himself.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Reason and nature
is the enemy of the artist .
James Ensor

If you could say it in words
there would be no reason
to paint.
Edward Hopper

  I had the need not to destroy
but to shift things. So I cut off heads...
and put them in impossible places.
I upset in order to find, at all cost,
another reality.
Chagall

Everybody is in your studio --
The past, Your friends,
Enemies, The art world,
And above all, your own ideas --
All are there.
But as you continue painting,
They start leaving,
One by one,
And you are left completely alone.
Then if you are lucky,
even you leave.
John Cage