Painting picture by picture, I followed the impressions my eye took in at heightened moments. I painted only memories, adding nothing, no details that I did not see. Hence the simplicity of the paintings, their emptiness.

To die is as if one's eyes had been put out and one cannot see anything any more. Perhaps it is like being shut in a cellar. One is abandoned by all. They have slammed the door and are gone. One does not see anything and notices only the damp smell of putrefaction.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

This kind of painting with its large frames is a bourgeois drawing-room art. It is an art dealer's art-and that came in after the civil wars following the French Revolution.

From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.

No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.

For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.

Disease, insanity, and death were the angels that attended my cradle, and since then have followed me throughout my life.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

A person himself believes that all the other portraits are good likenesses except the one of himself.

I painted the picture, and in the colors the rhythm of the music quivers. I painted the colors I saw.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color.

Sickness, insanity and death were the angels that surrounded my cradle and they have followed me throughout my life.

Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.

I build a kind of wall between myself and t he model so that I can paint in peace behind it. Otherwise, she might say something that confuses and distracts me.

I find it difficult to imagine an afterlife, such as Christians, or at any rate many religious people, conceive it, believing that the conversations with relatives and friends interrupted here on earth will be continued in the hereafter.

Death is pitch-dark, but colors are light. To be a painter, one must work with rays of light.

I have no fear of photography as long as it cannot be used in heaven and in hell.

I should have considered it wrong to have finished the Frieze before the room for its accommodation and the funds for its completion were available.