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"What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things."

"I really have a lot of stuff in my head; if only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things."

"It is essential to do the same subject over again, ten times, a hundred times. Nothing in art must seen to be chance, not even movement."

"It is very good to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what you can't see any more but is in your memory. It is a transformation in which imagination and memory work together. You only reproduce what struck you, that is to say the necessary."

"A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people."

"Painting isn't so difficult when you don't know ... But when you do ... it's quite a different matter!"

"You have to have a high conception, not of what you are doing, but of what you may do one day: without that, there's no point in working."

"I'm glad I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death."

"I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament ... I know nothing."

"A picture is something that requires as much trickery, malice, and vice as the perpetration of crime, so create falsity and add a touch from nature."

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything. But the air one sees in the paintings of the masters is not the air one breathes."

"Drawing is not what one sees but what one can make others see."

"Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money."
Letter to Jean-Baptiste Faure, contemporary art collector, 1877.

"How awful it is not being able to see clearly any more! I have had to give up drawing and painting and for years now content myself with sculpture ... But if my eyesight continues to dim I won't even be able to model any more. What will I do with my days then?"