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"From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side, followed me out when I played, followed me in the sun of springtime and in the glories of summer. They stood at my side in the evening when I closed my eyes, and intimidated me with death, hell, and eternal damnation. And I would often wake up at night and stare widely into the room: Am I in Hell?"

"A painting and a motif that I struggle with for an entire year are not expended in a single picture. If it is of such importance to me, why should I then not paint and vary a motif five times? Just look at what other painters depict over and over again ad infinitum: apples, palm trees, church towers, haystacks."
Munch on his painting The Sick Child.

"It would be quite amusing to preach a bit to all those people who for many years now have been looking at our paintings and either laughed or shook their heads reproachfully. They do not believe that these impressions, these instant sensations, could contain even the smallest grain of sanity. If a tree is red or blue, or a face is blue or green, they are sure that is insanity."

"They will not get it into their heads that these paintings were created in all seriousness and in suffering, that they are the products of sleepless nights, that they have cost me blood and weakened my nerves."

"At different moments you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting."

"If what you want to paint is the emotive mood in all its strength ... then you must not sit and stare at everything and depict it exactly as one sees it. You must paint the way it must be, exactly the way it appeared when you responded emotionally to the motif."

"Certainly a chair can be just as interesting as a human being. But first the chair must be perceived by a human being. In one way or another it must have affected him emotionally, and the viewer must be made to feel the same way. You should not paint the chair, but only what someone has felt about it."

"But can they [great works] get rid of the worm that lies gnawing at the roots of my heart? No, never."

"I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired. And I looked at the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature."

"My will exceeds my talents."

"When I paint, I never think of selling. People simply fail to understand that we paint in order to experiment and to develop ourselves as we strive for greater heights."